


This Cannot Continue

by The_Exile



Series: Ryuka [2]
Category: Phantasy Star (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, NaNoWriMo, Robot/Human Relationships, Sequel, Spoilers, references to Infinite Space, references to other phantasy star games
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-27
Updated: 2018-01-30
Packaged: 2019-03-10 05:01:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 17
Words: 49,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13495462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Exile/pseuds/The_Exile
Summary: An AU where Ayn decides to marry Mieu. Starting just after they defeat Siren together and attempt to crash land a shuttle in Lashute. They find themselves in a hellish landscape and uncover a Pilot's Guild conspiracy. Meanwhile, Sari has visions of Dark Force telling her to pull out the cursed sword and telling her she is the reincarnation of Alis. Thea, Lune and Alair journey to Hatazak and end up awakening Laya. With events rapidly happening too fast and uncovering a hidden second story of the exiled ship longing to return to Algol, their home is veering dangerously close to a wormhole, with a sinister force lurking on the other side, waiting for the chance to infest their ship and corrupt Algol.





	1. Prelude

Terminus. 

Every dome had its legends about Terminus. About how it was a barren wasteland where nothing could ever grow. That it was a cursed land, a place where evil dwelled at the very core of the world and seeped through into the rock and the soil so that anything that did managed to survive in that blighted land was warped into something so savage and twisted that it would exist for no reason other than to destroy all around it, to bring more pain and ruin into the world. That to exist there was survival of the fittest at every moment, except worse, as all life roamed the land of Terminus only to slay, to spread the evil further. That there wasn't any natural life remaining there, only demons. Maybe demons who looked like animals and plants and rocks but still beings not of this world but of a maelstrom of pure chaos that existed always on the other side of our realm but the veil was even thinner in the waking nightmare that was Terminus. 

It had been blocked for thousands of years, longer than any records remained. Sealed off by Laya or Orakio, depending on which side of the war you asked. Usually they would claim it was to seal away the evil wrought by the other side but occasionally a wiser sage would point to an even greater and older evil barely held back by the magical wards that prevented any entrance or exit from Terminus. Of course there were countless tales of those who had sneaked in and seen the demons in the flesh but none of them could be confirmed. It was always lunatics who died in the throes of their fits or were put down to stop them trying to slay everyone who entered their cell. Either that, or second hand accounts of those whose company had begun an expedition into Terminus but had managed to retreat through the few parts of the tunnels not sealed as they heard the screams of their companions who they knew were being dismembered in unspeakable ways. 

Terminus was not mapped except for that one image on the Monitor that was the Orakian royal treasure, that had disappeared when the last heir to Cille's throne, formerly of the Landen line, had also vanished from the face of the world. Of course it was he who was the subject of all the latest claims to have seen someone enter Terminus following the huge explosion that rocked the entire dome, the protective shield briefly flaring and, according to witnesses who didn't quite want to get close enough to confirm it, forming small cracks that spread and splintered, the lights of carefully inscribed runes gutting out. It was always Prince Ayn. Always he who would have to do the impossible, break all the laws of what was known, what was acceptable. Ayn, son of Rhys, with his Layan wife. Ayn who had rejected two perfectly good heirs from other royal families to elope with a female cyborg after stealing a space shuttle and redirecting its course from its regular flight to the moon and back. Ayn who had crashed said shuttle into the Terminus dome.

The official line was that Prince Ayn was dead. Nobody could have survived such an explosion, even though the debris from the shuttle had never been recovered and they had seen at least some debris come loose from the ship in the blast and there was no way any of the parts could have landed inside the dome's barrier, no, even though they had all seen it flash and clearly spotted that some of the explosions were happening on the other side. That was probably just a coincidence. Things exploded in Terminus all the time, just as things set on fire and huge techniques were cast and there were howls and screams and cracks of thunder and lightning and a hundred and one other things nobody wanted to go out and investigate.

The fact that there were larger, weirder things stalking the mountains around the sealed connecting passage to Terminus also meant nothing. They were just versions of the regular genetically engineered monstrosities that sometimes got loose. Mutations or just alpha males of the pack or something. They were familiar to anyone in Layan territory and it didn't mean anything that they were suddenly going out of control and attacking citizens in the first place.

The lights that had started blinking on and off these days, clearly mechanical, didn't mean anything either. The Guild had been clear on that point and you didn't want to mess with the Guild. 

Upon King Rhys' order, after a year of no contact with his son, succession had passed onto Princess Thea of Shushoran, who finally seemed interested in a suitor so she could at least produce an heir before disappearing on a mysterious mission. Okay, so he was mysterious as well - the rumours had it that he came from the moon - but he was at least identifiably male and Layan. 

Rhys didn't believe that his son was dead at all but he conceded to the Council that it was wise to be practical about the whole thing and, wherever he was and whatever he was doing, the Crown Prince was in no position to rule, whereas Princess Thea had held off endless hordes of mechanical invaders and, most recently, could turn into a dragon. Her betrothed was no slouch in battle either and they had been joined in what seemed to be a genuine and firm alliance by the Orakian Princess Sari, who fought like a demon. Why they had been joined in battle by Orakians when the invaders could only be Orakians was unfathomable - maybe they were having some sort of internal dispute, politics was so much more complicated than us versus them at the moment - but the alliance had even lasted after the robot attacks had ceased (according to rumour, because the errant Prince Ayn had slain their General) and was now holding strong through the next in the series of calamities that never seemed to stop befalling the world. 

Explosions in Terminus wasn't the best of omens for the future resolution of these crises…

Worlds shall burn, King Rhys remembered the fortune teller having said to him, the distant look in her eyes and monotone of her voice telling him that her trance was true. She had spoken of a great journey, and of the generations after his own. Ayn's continued absence only reminded him of this, as did the explosion that seemed as though the sky and the mountains the light washed over were on fire. And there had been the comets in the night, the falling stars that shook the very foundations of the earth where they made craters. Giant machines had been seen in the sky. The strange beasts had come out that night, too. Cults had been increasing in number since then, servants of dark powers, and the behaviour of some of the rulers in the border provinces had become stranger, so many attempts at royal abductions, suspicion of everyone on both Orakian and Layan sides leading to sudden civil war breaking out, the rumoured sacrifices... 

And the Guild had gone missing entirely. That in itself was bad news, especially coinciding with Ayn's disappearance, as Rhys was aware that his son had become increasingly curious about the Guild's activities and had been looking into them. The Guild was supposed to be a constant presence, though. They presented as historians, archivists, something akin to priests, the only people who knew how all the old systems worked. Not many people properly understood that the world was artificial, possibly some kind of spacecraft, and that the Guild was comprised of people who were descended from its original crew. The Guild was probably keeping all sorts of things running. And now they were gone, all of them, and everything was falling into disarray, and of course it was all left for Rhys to take the blame for. Because fixing two problems with the world's systems when you were only really the one handy with a sword protecting the people who actually knew what they were doing, two people who incidentally had fled along with his son, made you the ultimate authority on everything and the constant savior of the world. For all he knew, his son could actually be saving the world - he was reckless enough to try, as headstrong as his father had been, a character trait that had once seen Rhys thrown in a cell but his own father to prevent him from starting a war that technically already existed. Ayn had been asked to deal with the machine army and, whether or not it had been a direct result of his actions, that particular problem was now gone, so problems did get fixed around him. Except when he left entirely. 

Thea knew what this was about, of course, but she wasn't going to tell him. It wasn't for him to know. She would rather die than let anyone know the embarassing tale of how she had been spurned in favour of a cyborg - that Ayn's choice of companions was not out of practicality, as the two machines were probably hundreds of years old and knew all the world's secrets - but because the Prince actually loved the cyborg. Quite probably, she loved him back, with all the emotion or at least understanding of it that her programming allowed her. 

She was quite prepared to face the fact that he did not love her - that was his decision, and maybe fate all along, especially now she knew who her true destiny was - but the existence of that other woman who wasn't even human was something she couldn't bear the world to know. Maybe in private she could accept it but only for his sake.

Besides, she had a Kingdom to run, one abandoned at her lap, and also a father to mourn while carrying on the legacy of. A legacy of dragons.

It was not something she intended to shoulder alone, not for much longer.


	2. 1 - Ayn - Terminus

In fact, Ayn was probably the first to witness the truth behind all the rumours of Terminus in a millennia, once he had crawled out of the emergency hatch of the shuttle's mangled wreck. It was still sparking and smoking, displaying the sort of emergency lights that suggested it might be a good idea not to be standing so close to it, so he ran for a good while before he could no longer see the shuttle and decided it was probably safe. No explosions rocked the earth and lit up the sky - no more, at least - so Wren pronounced it safe to walk slowly back towards the abandoned craft to pick up their supplies. At least, it was probably safe for him to go in, the cyborg was well armoured and knew how to repair the systems where possible as he went along. 

It was only upon picking himself up from the river bank he had fallen into after tripping over a tree root in his haste to flee the potential disaster that it truly dawned upon him: Terminus has rivers. And trees. And a rather nice blue sky that he stared up at through the crack he had made in the dome, large enough to admit the remains of a thoroughly trashed shuttle but small enough that it didn't show up as a potential security breach on a monitor, although automated systems were already pouring in to repair the hole that their sensors told them existed, through the gravity pressure difference caused by open space leaking into the formerly into the carefully maintained habitable environment. Incidentally, said security drones were also looking out for the dangerous intruder who had not only trespassed onto the highest priority unauthorised area on the whole of Alisa III but also endangered everyone on board by making huge holes in the atmospheric shields. After all of the battles with rogue machines trying to take over the ship and slay everyone on board, Ayn was about to be hunted down by the few machines who were supposed to be awake and active, and were trying to preserve the life of the passengers. 'Profoundly ironic' were not words he wanted to appear on his tombstone - not that anyone had a clue where he was to pick up what was likely to remain of his corpse, or would even be willingly to set foot in terminus if they could ever believe he was in the cursed lands.

Something scuttling in the bushes on the opposite side of the bank dispelled another rumour about the place: that it contained no life. That said, he couldn't prove it wasn't a demon, not from the hideous screeching, grating cackle that came out of his mouth. At least he assumed it was a mouth. The thing that tore out of the undergrowth and disappeared down the other side of the riverbank looked like it had an identifiable mouth, as well as a tiny, hunched, twisted humanoid body with a bulbous, heavily veined head, large pointed ears, a pair of small, stubby horns and almost skeletal fingers that ended in sharp claws. A pair of stubby wings also sprouted from its back. Seconds after he spotted the creature, he heard it call out again, then the call was answered by several more, varying slightly in pitch, volume and speed but all slightly unearthly. 

Ayn was already not stupid enough to equate small size in animals with lack of danger. In his father's home town of Landen there had been creatures called chirpers that looked like ordinary, if rather large, birds, comically fat and round with endearing soft yellow feathers, like some sort of giant chick. They defended their territory with a ferocity that ended up with people dead if they were cornered by a flock of them. They were also, against all common sense, technique-users. It was upon encountering these birds that the Orakians knew for certain that the Layans, who were known to somehow create all the aggressive and unnatural creatures that existed in the world, were completely insane and beyond the state where they could be reasoned with. Ayn had since learned that Layans felt exactly the same about Orakians and the admittedly bizarre appearance of some of the more destructive machines that modern Orakians had nothing to do with the design of. Despite this lesson in humility, Ayn still took with him the original message of: never trust anything that looks small, cute and/or laughably absurd. These things had red glints in their bulbous, staring eyes that were not endearing at all and he was now unsure exactly how many of them were around him or whether they had already surrounded him or not. 

His grasp reached for the two-handed sword strapped over his shoulder. Most of his supplies had been abandoned in the rush but he was never without his sword any more. Wren's pulse cannon was more or less part of him, an attachment that slotted into his arm and used the same seemingly limitless power source as himself, so he had no problem charging it up as he also sensed danger. Mieu's claw weapons, fairly lightweight, usually hung from her belt or were kept strapped to her hands. The way she crouched down and sniffed the air, tilting her head to one side, was an almost feline gesture that accentuated her lethal grace as she sprang forwards before the other two had even seen the imps stream from the bottom of the riverbank, dripping with moss and slime and several other fluids he didn't want to know the origin of as well as water. They began casting techniques in horrendous screeching voices, using a language that sounded like a highly corrupted version of Layan that offended Ayn's senses with its syllables that would have been impossible for a human voicebox, even as they launched into a whirlwind of slashing claws, foul-looking fangs and cruel talons, their wings buzzing to hold them aloft as they went for the heads of their prey. 

Mieu met one of them with a pair of broad, sweeping strokes of her claws, crossing in the middle to eviscerate the imp. Its limp, tattered corpse fell from the sky even as she whirled around and sliced at the next opponent to try and ambush her from behind while she was busy with its ally. Her claw swiped through the air and met its throat, silencing its foul screams. A loud, cracking report like the sky being torn open heralded the firing of Wren's pulse laser cannon. Flashes of bright blue light were followed by thuds as great gouts of earth were thrown into the air, leaving burning craters. The three imps hit by the powerful bolts were reduced to ash. Their brethren screeched in response and wheeled out of the way, one of them with burning wings where it had taken a glancing hit from the laser. It spun out of control practically into Ayn's sword. Having almost bisected yet another imp, Ayn casually skewered this one. The morale of the remaining imps broke, their screeches of frustration promising revenge even as they melted back into the murky depths.

"They will return with reinforcements," Wren declared, "I am detecting other signs of life too, larger creatures and... things that make less logical sense. There are readings that aren't life, they are error messages that will not leave the radar and are coming this way. I suggest we collect our supplies before we find out first hand what they are."

Ayn nodded her agreement, “We can’t rush this, though. We don’t know what might have already come round behind us when it heard us running. Mieu, you scout ahead. Wren, you take up the rear, we won’t make it before at least some of those things come back.”

Mieu had been applying some simple healing techniques to the few wounds they had taken, claw marks and Zan technique burns. Their bites were indeed poisonous but Mieu had the facility to counteract most venoms. Those techniques did not recharge fast, however, and they had only the medical supplies they had managed to stuff into their pockets, so they realised all the more than it was a priority to get back to the shuttle. After finishing her medical checks, she vanished into a nearby bush.

“I’m not going to be able to get away with giving her orders once we’re married, am I?” Ayn sighed.

“Mieu and I do not consider ourselves your subordinates. You outrank us in human hierarchy, we outrank you in our own. In terms of battle strength, we are equal,” Wren told him, “Mieu is simply agreeing that your battle plan is sound.”

“Yeah, I know, but… it’ll have to be different when we’re married. I’ll have to make a big show of demonstrating that we’re equals, if only so that the council get the message.”

“Where I am built for largely solitary operations, Mieu is used to being part of a much larger command structure that no longer exists. She is not built to lead. I am not sure I see the wisdom in this plan to make her an equal ruler of an entire human settlement.”

“That’s the point, don’t you see? Our nation needs a fresh new perspective, even if it means someone new to leadership bringing in some very unorthodox methods. We’ve been doing things the same way for centuries. That’s how we ended up with these ridiculous wars, this petty hatred of a people we knew literally nothing about. At the very least, Mieu’s contacts with the central administration could mean we finally keep up with what’s happening all around our world.”

“I am willing to assist you with this plan. As a system administrator, I believe I am more qualified, although of course I cannot appear to outrank Mieu, at least in public.”

“Of course,” Ayn sighed. There were no two ways about it – the machines were going to take over very soon and it was all going to be his fault. Or maybe he was being naive in thinking that humanity had ever been in control.

Not that I can really think of humanity as my own species soon, he thought, now genuinely grim rather than just generically eternally harried. Not with what I’m going to have to do soon.

If I ever get out of here alive, that is...

* * *

It wasn’t without difficulty that the three of them managed to return to the shuttle. The imps stalked them along the entire trail, suddenly jumping out of bushes and streams and places where the three of them couldn’t even see a place for them to emerge from, as though they were oozing out of the ground. By the time they did see the dull grey-white boxy metallic shape of their shuttle, they discovered that they were not the only ones who knew of its whereabouts. They hadn’t been away that long and already a pair of shapes were rifling through the cargo hold, prying open boxes and inspecting the contents. They looked both feral and purposeful, darting from crate to crate and chattering softly to each other in a language just as abominable as the words that the imps had spoken. One used its long, sharp claws – or claw weapons like Mieu’s, they couldn’t tell from this distance, as the creatures seemed expert at keeping to the shadows – to tear open a jagged hole in one of the crates, the other barked at its partner and cuffed it with a swipe of a paw with claws still extended. Shaking its head in exasperation, the second creature held out one hairy, clawed finger, began chanting and directed a small but localised stream of fire from a disturbingly expertly cast Foi technique, burning a circular hole in the side of the crate. The burned section fell away and was swiped before it could clang to the floor. 

Circling around the shuttle and creeping through the undergrowth, the three of them managed to get closer to the creatures without being spotted. Taller than humans but stooping, they had powerful, shaggy bodies and goat-like horns on their snouted, sharp-fanged heads. Ayn was surprised to note that they wore perfectly serviceable clothes and an assortment of gaudy but well crafted jewellry. He wondered if these goat-things were more sophisticated than he gave them credit for, if they had stolen the clothes as they clearly intended to do with his supplies or if these beasts were transformed humans. He had seen what he thought was a perfectly normal, if rather powerful technique using, human turn into a dragon, which he had not even realised was a creature that really existed, so now he tended to keep an open mind about such matters. Believing that things were at least a possibility was always a better option than refusing to believe them, being caught out by them and dying to them. 

If they were intelligent enough to talk a recognisable language and use advanced thieving techniques, he mused, they could be reasoned with. Well, he corrected himself, it was at least worth a try. His technique-sensitive mind, given to him by his mother and her Layan genes, filled him with crippling nausea when he so much as tried to brush his will against the things, as though they were the products of something evil and destructive, something that stank of the rotten corpses of the victims it ate. Still, there was a time when his father would have believed such personal habits of Layans. Signalling his intentions to the others, he strode confidently towards the goat-creatures (Goatdukes, he decided to call them, as their outfits reminded him of a particularly pompous duke he had been forced to sit in audience with once), his hand visibly on his sword arm and his will focussed on a technique but not yet targeting anything. The two cyborgs remained out of sight.

As soon as he stepped out of the cover, their hircine heads snapped towards him, their eyes glowing red in the gloom. The pyromaniac one hissed and pointed at him, its chanting becoming louder and more frenzied. Ayn quickly threw a Deban shield around himself, drawing his sword and pointing it at the Goatdukes.

“Move away from my cargo and I will let you leave,” he announced in what he hoped was a loud but calm, confident voice. The Goatduke technique-user hissed its frustration at missing him while the other one cocked its head, snarling its confusion and yelling something back at him in its own language. Ayn cursed his luck – he spoke both Layan and Orakian fluently and had no idea what language the Goatdukes could be using. It barely sounded like noises possible for something roughly humanoid to produce. It didn’t sound friendly but then he doubted that anything could sound friendly in that tongue. After five seconds, the Goatdukes both screeched at him and ran towards him, claws flung back with the clear intention of bringing them around for a swing at him. They were fast but Mieu, barrelling in from behind a tree, was faster. She caught one across its face and locked claws with the other one, until suddenly there were three hissing, screeching, clawing maniacs scrabbling around in the clearing and pouncing on each other. Seconds later, a fully charged pulse of laser energy caught one point blank and threw it down the grassy bank towards the shuttle again. It had managed to pull Mieu to the ground and was trying to stab downwards at her, and the shot had almost hit the other cyborg as well. She yelled something obscene-sounding in machine code, then spun into a backswing that slashed the throat of the other Goatduke who believed her to be distracted. Shaking herself down, cleaning the vile-smelling thick ichor and clumps of matted fur off her claws, she thanked Ayn when he passed her a dimate from one of the damaged crates. 

“This equipment can no longer be safely stored, so we might as well take it with us for immediate use,” announced Wren, applying a dimate to his own synthetic skin where a stray Foi technique had given him a rather nasty burn. Ayn was endlessly impressed that the much more obviously mechanical cyborg was still able to make use of human medical facilities. Wren was rather modest about the capability, saying that he sacrificed a lot of structural toughness in the name of being easier to repair. Even more impressive was his ability to use techniques – Mieu went even further by being able to use human healing techniques of her own – but he insisted that these were no evidence that he had any kind of true mind or eternal soul, only good substitutes that gave the same result as the human equivalent. 

A quick inventory count revealed that quite a lot of items had been damaged beyond repair by the crash, including, to Ayn’s frustration, the crate of rare Moon Dew and Star Mist that he swore was the most carefully secured now containing only a pile of smashed once-ornate phials and a sickly viscous liquid that was a mix of colours and smells that clashed horribly with each other. The acrid fumes it gave off were making Ayn light-headed and adding a strange swirly vivid-coloured tint to his eyesight so he decided to hand it to Wren to safely detonate before he could throw up or mutate into a Goatduke. It then occurred to him that Wren might not be immune to the accidental concoction but the cyborg had already come back without it, a satisfied look on his face, before Ayn could comment. Meanwhile, Mieu carefully retrieved and safely repackaged all the items that had survived both the crash and the attempted theft. 

“At least it’s a small enough amount to carry now,” she told him, handing him a backpack filled with medical supplies, “We can’t stay here forever, we’ll be surrounded by a big enough pack of those things to rout us out, and as soon as we leave, the shuttle will probably be stripped of anything useful. Besides,” she reminded Ayn with a pointed look, “We have a job to do.”

“Calling it a ‘job’ sounds so wrong,” complained the Prince, scratching the back of his head, “You’re right as usual, though. Wren, is the shuttle’s scanner operational? A city is going to be too small to pick out on the monitor, even a large floating one.”

“We need to think about how we’re going to reach Lashute without any functional method of flight,” Wren pointed out as he reached overhead and attempted to turn on the scanner. After flicking the switch up and down a few times, soldering a few wires back together and running his own power through it, together with a lot more machine code swearing, he managed to acquire an image of Terminus that stayed stable for more than five seconds. After finally persuading it that, yes, he did have the authority to be anywhere near Terminus, honest, the system finally relented to show him where Lashute was. The city hung over the central lake like a vulture hovering over a battlefield, waiting for the doomed soldiers on both sides of a terrible war to die and become food. A city shouldn’t look so sinister, not on a map that only just showed a vague wireframe shape in broad green. Everything looked slightly off – the angles of the architecture, the way it was hovering, the signals flocking around it that were somewhere between life and machine, monster and natural animal and even human… and something much larger and more powerful than it had any right to be, dwelling in the background, glitching out every needle on the meters, waiting… lurking… corrupting simply by being… Ayn had a headache again and not just because of the fumes that hadn’t worn off yet.

He didn’t want to, on a fundamental level his senses screamed at him not to, but he also knew that he had to get there, whatever it took, or there would be no future for anyone or anything, ever. 

 

As they trekked across Terminus to the lake above Lashute, there was a lot to talk about. There was a lot to fight as well, and their conversations kept attracting attention no matter how much they whispered in low voices and kept to the long grass. Still, that was information in itself, knowing what kind of creatures lived here, and several of their plans already involved hitching a lift on one or another type of flying creature or constructing a device from its corpse using Wren's considerable outdoor survival skills. Preferably, he emphasised, not one of the creatures that was currently on fire. 

"Those creatures... what was the rather poetic name you gave for them?" asked Wren, pointing to a crumpled, smouldering bundle of rags and stick-like bones in a charred clearing on the floor.

"Malific," said Ayn, "The red ones are Dires, the purples one are Baneful. I'm... sorry if it sounds frivolous. There's just such evil about them..." (About this entire region...)

"As long as it fits within the character limit on my database, it is not a problem for me," reassured Wren as he trained the laser scope on his gun to point at the wreckage of what looked like a breathing apparatus hooked up to an unidentifiable backpack by several thick metal cables. Like everything technological they had glimpsed so far in terminus, the design looked advanced but also sinister somehow, with severe, jutting shapes and angles that didn't seem quite possible, eldritch runes inscribed above pulsing red service lights and cables jabbed straight into the pallid, rubbery skin of the almost-human things' gaunt, hairless heads. Their claw-like, shrivelled hands and feet had still twitched and sparked with wild magic even as they should have been dead. There was a sense that the technology had been fused with them against their will, that they were only channels for the immense amount of technique energy running through them that they clearly did not have the clarity of mind to control, if they had minds at all. More likely they were puppeteered by something else far more sinister and dangerous. If they had ever had a will and were not created using some lost, vile art, they had long since lost it by force of a larger psychic predator or by unfortunate contract. 

"The backpack appears to be connected to their robes in a way that would suggest it somehow aids their flight," Wren pointed out, practical as ever in the middle of such ghoulish horrors, "The robes deflate when the backpack is deactivated. There was clearly technique use involved but this was synthetic in nature, generated by the mechanisms within the backpack."

"Are you suggesting we reverse engineer this technology for ourselves?" asked Mieu.

"I could even fit such a device directly onto myself. It would not be perfectly compatible but I have slots for similar devices..."

"I don't think we should be touching anything we find here, never mind trying to fuse it with ourselves," said Ayn, holding his nose against the rancid oily stench, "What if we could be controlled through it too?"

"Unlikely. Such a connection would have been severed by the damage the device took," he mused, "Besides, I know enough to be able to locate and deactivate such a third party override connection."

"You've seen these before, Wren?" asked Mieu. It was her turn to look horrified, where before she had only looked sickened by the impact of the noxious smells and sights on her finely tuned senses, and maybe a little fascinated by the laser pointer, "Technology such as this was banned a long time ago, at least when it can be used on humans or AI sophisticated enough to be considered people. It's not even legal in warfare. To have been alive when this technology was in circulation..."

"I have not been in operation quite that long," Wren corrected her, not looking at all offended, "There have been incidents, though. I had even suspected it might have been used on Siren. I was relieved to find out it was only obsolete orders and faults caused by everyday battlefield damage. No, the last time I encountered a puppeteered android, it was mostly definitely illegal and it almost resulted in Hatazak being destroyed. Fortunately we realised the city's administrator was not following standard protocol, the under-administrator managed to activate the emergency override of our hierarchy and we interrogated out of him the locations of all the explosives in the town. The interesting thing was, the war criminal had been trying to access the underwater layer below our city, not directly target Hatazak itself. We've always known something was down there, but..."

"Well, if anywhere is going to have technology that illegal, it's this accursed place," said Ayn, "And we don't know how much they've been developing the technology since you last dealt with it. You might not be dealing with the same thing any more at all. Who knows if what you've learned about how to counteract it still holds true - if I was trying to improve it, I know the first thing I'd do is look at what I've already seen no longer work because the enemy has defences against it now."

"This most makes me worried about what we'll find in Lashute," said Mieu, "If our sensors are correct and they haven't also developed jamming technology - and to be honest the readings make so little sense I would not be surprised - the city is the only conglomeration of more than a handful of definitely human life signs. Maintaining such technology would require extensive resources and staffing."

"You said that this is a Guild-owned city?" asked Ayn. Wren nodded.

"It is the closest thing to the bridge of the ship. They considered it their place of holy pilgrimage before it was sealed off. Or, at least, they maintained the illusion that they no longer visited Lashute. We had always suspected they had some kind of back door into Terminus. If they can hijack other AI and humans, this opens up a lot more possibilities for their means of trespassing than the obvious hacking or higher grade teleportation techniques."

"Are the Guild really capable of all this?" asked Ayn, "I mean, they've always had a different way of looking at things to us and they've been responsible for a lot of shady dealings but... this seems to be a whole other level..."

"Much as I suspect their involvement in the Hatazak explosion, this level of production of such forbidden technology surprises even me," admitted Wren, "The most logical explanation is yet another party involved in all of this. Someone with the resources to help even the Guild and who also wants to steer their activities down an even darker path."

"For someone so sinister to have the Guild, of all factions, under their control..." Ayn shuddered.

"It's likely that the Orakian and Layan people have also been manipulated for a long time, and probably not by the Guild," said Wren, "More and more evidence points towards the war being deliberately engineered. The Guild have no real use for a war on that scale. However, their technology is the most likely explanation for why so many passages between worlds have been unnecessarily closed off for so long, spreading more isolation and misinformation."

"So, either someone else has been using the Guild's technology or someone has even been manipulating them," said Ayn.

"They are very prone to ritualism and mysticism," said Mieu, "If someone managed to set up a situation where they appeared to be in some way spiritually important to the Guild... and with the trappings that are used in the technology here, there is an element of spiritual malevolence that could be interpreted as actual demonic activity."

"At this rate, I'm not convinced there aren't demons myself," admitted Ayn, "But I'm not saying I'm likely to give up. Demons can be slain, and in the old legends, it's always the Prince who strikes the final blow with his divine blade."

"And the truth is always that the women secretly organised most of it to happen and the foot soldiers cleared the path for him," Mieu sighed, an amusing sound to come out of a synthetic humanoid, "Come on, enough pondering. No strapping demonic technology to ourselves. No waiting around for our enemies to surround us. We must approach closer, maybe see how the Guild is entering and leaving the building, sneak in with them or steal their method of entry if possible."

"It's still possible to talk to them," Ayn said, "I've met Guildsmen before. They're just people really."

"That was a long time ago, and we have seen how well it went when you last tried to negotiate with someone in Terminus," said Mieu.

"That was a goat thing," Ayn pointed out, "The people of Lashute are probably not goat things. Maybe."

As they continued along the softly rolling meadow that was surprisingly pleasant apart from the swarm of flying circuit boards that suddenly dropped out of the sky and flew straight at them, all casting Gra, they looked across the horizon at the now clearly visible city that hung ponderously above the waterline, a severe black iron monument of strangely baroque terraces that spoke of a style that was ancient, yet the technology that kept this thing afloat was probably beyond anything anybody else was capable of. Red lights blinked on and off like the gazes of predatory beasts watching all the tiny prey below them as they decided upon their next meal. 

Weary though he was, Ayn no longer let go of the hilt of his sword. Try as he might to imagine that these people were misinformed, innocent victims of some great celestial scam like the others he had been able to negotiate with, he suspected he had finally reached the scammers and that he was even now sucked into their game. He resolved that he would not be a pawn, but finally be the glitch that throws the whole insidious plan into chaos.

An odd thing for a Prince to be, but he suspected nothing had gone how it was meant to for a long time now.


	3. 3 - Lune - Aridia

Meanwhile, in the central dome of Aridia, on the outskirts of its one town, Hatazak, an enormous dragon towered over the glistening lake that was the only body of water in the entire biosphere. 

Unlike Terminus, which had initially been called that because it was the stopping point of a lot of cargo shuttle flights and various non-passenger transit railroads that wove through the now collapsed tunnels and brought vital equipment to and from the bridge on Lashute, Aridia had not always been known by that name. When it was Terraria, it had teemed with life but now it was a vast desert after it had been the site of the most fierce battles in the entire Orakio-Laya war. It was unfortunate for the few cyborg inhabitants and even fewer human settlers that they were caught in the middle of the most strategically important location in the entire conflict: the administrative centre of the world, the site of most of its control systems. The only blessing was that the systems themselves had been considered forbidden targets in the war - even the most unscrupulous mercenaries weren't insane enough to damage equipment that was literally keeping their world from dying, and the only neutral third party, the Guild, were even more fanatical in preserving systems that they considered themselves to own. Still, the fires of war, often literal in the case of the powerful technique users at the head of the Layan army, had ravaged the natural beauty of Terraria and created a land that was only suited to the cyborgs who still scuttled around the same paths, performing their unceasing services, now a lot more wary of humans and their battle servitors. 

Hatazak itself was a strangely silent city, staffed only by maintenance cyborgs who had been there for over a thousand years without ever changing their roles, apart from a wizened old techno-priest and venerable Guild Elder and his acolytes, whose extremely prestigious if rather unenviable role was to stay there and provide the few basic services that a human visitor might still be granted out of necessity, if a human ever turned up who had legitimate authority to be there and could do something about the mess that the world was now in. 

A dragon wasn’t something they were completely unaware of the existence of but the humans had never seen one before and the cyborgs had only seen them from afar on the battlefield. They were vaguely aware that dragons were sentients, that many of them were actually transformed humans with high-level administrative access, and though they still kept away from the huge beast, they didn’t try to call security or take any steps to prevent the dragon from approaching the whirlpool in the middle of the otherwise tranquil lake. The vortex of water had always been there, had never stopped moving, and didn’t affect anything around it, so it didn’t take the cyborgs’ memories of its true purpose to realise that it was artificial. Still, the dragon didn’t even need this to know what was awaiting her. 

It had speaking to her for a long time now, in her mind, directing her through the tunnels to Aridia and towards the lone, dusty town and its mysterious whirlpool in the sole oasis. Dragons were many things but they were not naturally telepathic, yet she could clearly hear the other woman and answer her as if she herself had the talent. To not only convey messages from an entire bio-dome away but also host the other end of the conversation implied a monumental level of psychic strength. Telepathy wasn’t even a regular technique, but an exotic, lost art from the days when Laya walked the earth, burning entire continents in her titanic battle with Orakio.

This woman was from that time as well as that level of power, the dragon realised as she peered into the whirlpool, planning her aquatic descent. She could tell from the almost alien way her psychic conversation partner’s thought patterns worked, the way she understood the world, the few things she referenced that were even recognisable any more.

Flattening her wings to her side, she dove inside the eye of the maelstrom, barely causing a splash as she parted the water with sinuous serpentine grace. Water slipped easily off her scales and fell away. As her spiny tail descended into the depths, a pair of soft, somber brown eyes watched her leave, a hint of concern in his eyes. Even though it felt foolish to worry about a woman who was actively transformed into a dragon, he couldn’t help be uncomfortable seeing his fiance disappear out of sight into the water. So much had happened already, things that had already proven too much for a dragon, although that had been an old and weary dragon. The things that were going on in the world were too much for any one person alone, even when they commanded an entire lunar space station full of faithful genetically engineered beasts. Queen Thea had insisted that the voice she heard was benevolent and gentle but she had admitted that it was very powerful and seemed insistent. Back when he still fought a senseless war, Lune had sometimes heard voices in his head spurring him onwards, inspiring him to commit greater and greater acts of atrocity. Powerful as she was, Thea was not as experienced in such matters, and it was when you were alone that such things tended to strike. 

“Brother, I have told you before not to worry about us so much,” the woman at his side told him in a stern whisper, “We are not fragile creatures and you do not always know best. This is her destiny, her decisions to make.”

“Her destiny is mine, now. We are to bond as one,” he protested with a smile at the thought, “And, as we are who we are, our destinies are those of the entire world. We are no longer isolated, sister, we have responsibilities, and if we get this wrong, it could be a disaster for all life on the ship.”

“Still, it will do you no good to break under the pressure, or to make mistakes by interfering with each other’s work where it is not necessary,” she said, “And do not forget that we are supposed to be keeping watch. There are concrete threats here, ones with big teeth, that should definitely be our first priority.”

“You will understand, sister, when you have someone of your own that is more important to you than anything else, that it is easier said than done to make anything else your priority.”

“And here you were lecturing me on seeing the bigger picture,” she sighed, “I like Thea – she has never once complained about my constant presence or misunderstood our close family bond. I ask that you do not also forget that bond, Lune. It wasn’t that long ago that you were telling other people the same thing about our bond that you just told me of you and Thea. Do not get it into your head that I’m jealous or plotting anything, only consider that I will not be completely cast aside,” her smile was thin and cold, “Besides, it will do her no good if you let us all die because you don’t spot an ambush because you’re staring at the ground and arguing with me.”

“Stop arguing with everything I say, then,” he sighed, but he did stand up straight and look around him, his will focussed on the trigger for a long chain of battle techniques, one hand closed upon a las-slicer, a bladed boomerang made of two laser beams in force fields projected from a titanium core. It was a perfect combination of viciously primitive combat tactics that had been tried and tested over a millennia and the apex of not only modern technology but also a few tricks that had been lost over time to anyone who hadn’t spent several centuries exiled to an abandoned space station.

Compared to a lot of places, there wasn’t all that much here that was a real threat to him. The cyborg patrols cleaned most of the dangerous monsters from the region, although lately the task had been increasingly difficult. The monsters that escaped their sights were still mostly weak enough for Lune to retake control. The only things he truly dreaded fighting were the great lizards, mottle-skinned and grey-striped, with huge maws full of fangs that were coated in a lethal venom he had seen slay a person with one bite – and that wasn’t even when the terrifying saurians didn’t managed to bite a person’s head off with one clamp of its blood-drenched jaws. Shaking the ground as they roared and stomped with surprising speed towards its prey, they chased down anything that moved, seemingly able to digest nearly everything. Still, they had an enormous appetite and the desert couldn’t possibly be verdant enough to support such massive, ravenous creatures. Lune wondered if they had wandered through the newly opened passages and couldn’t get back again, or were just confused and hungry and had no idea what to do in a biome they had never seen before. In a way, he sympathised with them, after so long in exile. Unlike himself, though, there was no real way to save them. 

At least, he hoped he wasn’t being too optimistic with his assessment of himself and his chances of deliverance from the evil he had inadvertently sold his soul to.

“Yes, I suppose I am rather a hypocrite,” he sighed to himself, when he saw that his sister was looking the other way.

* * *

Twisting through the water, Thea marvelled to herself once again at how perfect its composition was. Clean and pure despite being the only water source, and the industry that had to be required to maintain a biome of cyborgs, reflecting a blue that didn't match the turbulent skies but also didn't feel artificial at all. Not that the skies of this world were natural, she remembered, trying to push out of her mind the strange disconnection with reality that crept into her senses whenever she was reminded that her world had been a slowly drifting starship all along - a sensation that for some reason caused her more issues than the apparently relative small change that she was a dragon now. 

The whirlpool itself didn't seem to work the way most whirlpools did. It simply drifted in the middle of the lake, never expanding or receding or changing in any way, never sucking anything in but, by contrast, seeming to exist as an obstruction to entry, a maze that she had to concentrate hard to carefully navigate, as though she were picking a giant lock with her own body. It was only when she reached the other end and breached the surface again, gasping with the sudden shock of air - warm but not compared to the dry, blasting heat of the Aridian desert winds - that she felt as though the forces of nature were working as she would expect them to. The waters around her began to churn violently, pulling her from side to side, until she whipped her tail around and unfurled her wings and dragged herself, roaring, away from the forces that wanted to pull her back in. Or out. As she fell out of a majestically unspoiled blue sky, it occurred to her what had happened and it made her head spin, even though it made perfect sense in an environment that could probably be whatever gravity it wanted.

The whole thing was upside down. This was the correct way up. The sky she had just fallen out of was the surface of the water and, from this world's perspective, she had ascended from the lake bed. The physics behind it, as well as the amount of energy that must have been expended to keep the whole illusion running, made her senses reel again, so much that she almost failed to recognise that she was still falling from the sky with a very real and free gravity. With a rather undignified manic flurry of her broad emerald-scaled wings, she pulled herself around into a kind of uncoordinated spin, before gliding low across the clearing and then hitting the ground with a force that scraped off a lot of the turf, releasing clods of earth, before she spun head over heels again and landed upside down below a tree.

"What?" she demanded of the disembodied voice she still knew, from the tingling feeling in the back of her neck, was still watching her with ethereal regality that was starting to make her feel a little sick, "I'm NEW to being a dragon, all right? I bet you were new to being... whatever the hell you are... once. I bet when you were an apprentice, you used to accidentally talk to the wrong person and wake people up and switch on your telepathy when you were singing in the bath and..."

"My, you must look strange talking to yourself in the middle of the mess you made of my private forest," the voice replied with the same soft calmness as ever. Thea finally found out whether dragons could blush or not. She picked herself up and shook the soil off her scales. Staring at the ruined foliage around her, she briefly wondered if she could do anything to fix it, then reasoned that the place could afford a gardener if it could afford its own upside down whirlpool, whereas her untrained hands would only make things worse. She regretted what she had done as she looked around at the silent garden with its gentle breeze. Some of these trees were quite rare and difficult to grow under anything but these perfect circumstances. There was a strange undying fragility to this place, a land outside time that nobody had even realised the existence of for centuries.

Except the robots had realised it was there, she remembered, and they had been fierce in protecting it from anyone who didn't have a reason to be there. It had taken a lot to persuade them to leave her to her business. What could be here, that required this much protection and this much ceremony? It had to be something to do with this woman, she realised. The powerful sorceress who had called to her across the other end of the world, who spoke like a Queen of Worlds and was not afraid to taunt dragons. 

Well, Thea decided, I am also a Queen, and I am not afraid of her. I will not be cowed by all of this. I will demand answers for the good of the entire world.

The inner world was not a big place and her large reptilian strides soon took her to the other side. A single building took up most of the forest, a tiered square pyramid of huge sandstone blocks. She recognised this as a temple to Laya, one of the many such shrines dotted around the world. None of them had been accessible since anyone could remember, all of them booming out in a loud voice (similar to this woman's, she realised) that 'only one of Laya's blood may enter', except that even the Layan aristocrats who had carefully traced their bloodline back to their founder and knew for certain that they were the genetically closest people alive to the Goddess-Queen were turned back with the same impartial, forbidding tone. This one was about twice the size of the normally uniform structures, however, and as she approached the temple, she heard something she had not seen before in one of the usually rather taboo places: several footsteps and the low whispering of human voices with very strong, archaic Layan accents. Walking straight in through the doorway despite her unease and confusion, she immediately felt several eyes trained upon her.

They didn't feel hostile, only wary, rather like people who had been expecting a guest but not this particular guest. There were a handful of men in shimmering cyan robes, all old enough to have white beards that were ritually braided with highest-quality Laconia beads. Several women, rather ageless in their bearing, with long, freely flowing raven-black hair and striking yellow robes, beckoned her into the central chamber and then swept in behind her. 

Thea had seen one of these central chambers before, had prayed at their altars, when she was tested at a young age to see if she possessed the necessary qualifications to unlock their mysteries. This one also glowed with an eerie blue light, a perfectly flat huge raised stone plinth with steps leading down to it on all sides. Ancient Layan hieroglyphs were inscribed across the base. Usually they felt cold and silent, a soul as impenetrable as a sleeper that can never be awakened. There was warmth and life here, and as she descended the steps upon the prompting of the priests and priestesses who formed corridors to either side of her, she heard a voice immediately call out to her in a tone that she had never heard from one of these things before. She actually cried out when a woman appeared before her on the plinth, emerging from a shimmering haze of magic and extending a hand in greeting to Thea, an open smile on her face.

Instantly, Thea knew that this was the woman who had called to her mind and summoned her here.

"Greetings," said the woman, "Welcome to my abode. I apologise for it's remoteness but I am vulnerable in my sleep and my watchers are not exactly a large enough force to guard me from no doubt a large queue of people waiting to end my life for a sin that is not mine alone. I can rely only on this place's inaccessibility."

Opting for complete honesty, Thea replied, "It was a close call, you know. Someone almost destroyed Hatazak trying to get down here. Some of the cyborgs have made it their duty to guard you."

"Trust me, brute force would not have been sufficient. You are here, you could even find the place, because I lowered the magical barriers around the entrance. Not to mention weakened the pull of the whirlpool a little," she smiled, her eyes suddenly fond, "I am glad to hear that Orakio still forgives my sister enough to leave someone in place to guard me, though."

"You speak as though you know Orakio in person."

"Well, we were not that close. He was a lot fonder of my sister before..." she frowned and averted her head, misery evident in her half-closed eyes, "I am sorry. I am rambling. Cryogenic suspension is so difficult on the mind as well as the body, I hope that this can be the last time before it starts to truly wear me down," she sighed, then turned and looked Thea full in the face, her chestnut eyes alive with power, "This is probably going to be hard for you to believe, but I am Laya's blood sister."

Thea studied the woman's face, possessing the same ageless, flawless beauty as those around her, so much so that she would have suspected realistic cyborg over God-Queen's direct relative. She still could not have been a thousand years old, not while being human. That said, Laya was hardly considered human these days, and this was a place of both powerful magic and high technology... It was difficult to be sceptical, even though claiming to be Laya or her direct descendant was a common trick of charlatans or delusion of lunatics.

"You look a lot like your sister, and good for your age."

"Why, thank you," she replied, a smile crossing her face, "You may call me Laya, now. It is more of a formal title than a name, and now that my sister... along with Orakio... did not survive the war... it has been passed on to me."

"I understand," said Thea, "Although I do not understand why you speak of two sworn enemies as though you mourn both of them, that they were... something a lot closer."

"Oh, my poor nation," she sighed, "We have abandoned you for too long, such little resources we have, how badly we planned. If only we had gathered enough energy to power this machine more than one last time... History has become distorted in the absence of witnesses to the truth, and in its absence... that thing... the thing we feared most of all..."

"Are you okay?" asked Thea, "You're shivering like hell and it's not exactly cold."

"I... will survive..." she sighed, "Let us wander, and I will tell you the truth. We have no time to waste sitting here while the world falls apart around us."

Thea bit back the urge to retort, Oh, so you ARE up to date with current affairs.


	4. 4 - Sari - Aquatica

Sari dreamed.

She dreamed of a hunt through the plains of Aquatica, as she often did. It was how she spent most of her daily life, honing her skills and keeping the citizens of her nation safe from the roaming monsters as they travelled between the newly united cities of Landen and Satera, now that the bridge across the massive lake had been rebuilt. She rarely hunted at night, however - and it was a dark, chill night, with the twin moons and a blanket of clear, bright stars hanging in the sky, a night where everything seemed full of potential, leading up to a momentous event, silent except for faint chirps of crickets and the hum of the sky and the ground beneath her feet. She also wore armour she had never seen before, heavier than she was used to - she liked to be light and fast on her feet, to spring upon her prey like a wild beast and score the instant kill. The dazzling silvery breastplate and gauntlets were of high quality Laconia, both beautiful and functional in design, a very archaic look. She guessed it was probably Royal class or even Planar. Even more strangely, she wore a long, traditional pink dress in place of her usual practical, sturdy brown tunic. Her lips curled up in distaste - it looked like the sort of thing her maids would try and dress her in, despite her mother ordering them to give her clothing she wouldn't immediately wear out, or at least that wasn't too costly to replace. However, it was at least thick material and tied up at the hem so she could run, although this made her feel a little vulnerable at its shortness in places.

It also reminded her of something she had seen in a mural or an ancient history textbook or maybe even one of the carvings in the oldest of the shrines. Combined with the calf-length white boots and a band collecting her hair together so that it flowed down her back but was kept out of her eyes... Looking at herself in the reflection of the lake just outside Ilan, she kept seeing someone else, someone as legendary as Laya and Orakio, maybe even more so, her name lost in the midst of time...

An unearthly howl echoed through the deep darkness and she instinctively reached for the twin knives at her belt. She had no knives, and, in fact, no belt. But that didn't make sense... she was supposed to have a sword... she always had her sword when she was the Alisia... wait, she thought to herself, what the hell is an Alisia and why do I keep thinking I need a sword when I don't even bother to practise with something as big and hefty and cumbersome as a full sized sword?

You know who you are, said a voice in her head, who you were and will always be. I have a sword for you. A sword passed down from generation to generation. You are still pure enough of bloodline and, though technically it isn't her own bloodline, it will be good to see an auburn-haired Valkyrie Queen storm the worlds once more...

Cut it out with your empty flattery, she hissed, speaking back into its mind as instinctively as if it was perfectly normal to call out offensive disembodied telepathic voices in the middle of the night, I hear all this bullshit already from a million and one suitors during the day. And they're all just after something from me and my family, or they wouldn't bother courting the most embarrassing Princess in the land. What are you trying to get out of me, hm?

You know how I am, the voice replied, and what I want. You have always known, deep in your soul, in your darkest memories.

As she stared, bemused, down at the dark waters, they rippled and then churned, whipped up by a storm that didn't exist anywhere else. Her reflection was distorted into chaos, fragmented into a million shattered splinters. When the lake was clear again, she did not see her own reflection at all but only the moonlight playing across the last gentle ripples. 

The pattern they made sent a chill down her spine, made her forget to breathe for a moment. A leering face made of the burning stars, the darkness between space, ancient and vast and looming. It looked like a skull's grimace, a tyrant's ritual death mask, something inhuman, something whose eyes shone manically with base, corrupted urges of murderous hatred but which was also malevolently intelligent, with sharp teeth, a beetle-like carapace and eyes like supernovae turning into black holes as stars died.

Yes, I can still feel your fear, how you use it as a blade, master it so that it does not dominate you, said the voice. Its laughter was mocking as a violent wind whipped across the plains, almost knocking her over, sweeping the water out of the way and dispelling the image. Afterwards, the water did not reform but remained parted, so that a path of shimmering moonlight opened up into the water, between her and that old sunken temple the locals feared so much...

This is such an obvious trap, she growled.

Indeed, but you're still going to spring it anyway. Because it's too tempting, too curious, and you've come so far now, and you want to see where it goes, because you're humans and that's what they do, they just keep on going for no real reason other than to see what happens next. And besides, you know it feels right, don't you? It all makes so much sense. Your destiny might be broken but it'll still cause more harm than good to break away from it for good. Because the spirit of the stars will not endure the terrible changes that you know await them just a few more miles across the sky if you turn any further from the fate you thought you all escaped...

I have no idea what you're talking about, but I'll let you know, I'm not afraid of a few ugly faces and ominous words and tricks of the light. I'll take your bait, all right, and I'll bite the first of you who tries to reel me in!

Whipping her head around and rather enjoying the way her hair flowed in the wind - maybe she should wear it loose more often - she strode down the path. She held her head up high as though the slime-covered, black stone temple was her own palace and she its Queen as much as she would one day rule everything else in Aquatica (maybe other lands if they pissed her off enough or if she thought she could take them in battle and would do a better job than the current rulers). Gargoyles with the same faces as the ghoul in the water leered down at her, the impression only made more unnerving by the long years of the erosion of the water that gave them the look of something rotten yet still alive, like the dead that sometimes rose again in Frigidia according to their legends. She glared at them as she went past, daring them to try anything. I can still kill with my fists and feet, still break weathered old stone she told them, and soon I will have a sword. Wait, how the hell do I know there's really a sword?

The path through the shrine was a labyrinth, made for some spiral procession down high-vaulted corridors with only a few tinted windows in crenelations on the ceiling, through which only the faintest rays of light shone. She could hear eerie music, low and monotonous, and chanting in a dead language that sounded like the buzzing of flies. Flashes of fear kept assaulting her mind, of being trapped, lost, alone in the dark, how this was a really good place for an ambush, or just for the waters to flood back in again and drown her, or maybe fire, this time... No, she shook her head, this was yet another challenge and she would fail if she lost her nerves. She chanted a mantra of her own, one of her battle katas, as she trod the corridors, measuring time and distance by her own footfalls. She was turning inwards, she knew, and if the space inside matched the space outside, it wouldn't be long...

Here she was. A vast, dark chamber, choked with aquatic weeds and lichen. A corridor of pillars with gargoyles watched her as she walked down the middle of the room, down a few steps to the black rock altar in the middle. Suspicious stains ran down the vast slab of stone, their origins covered up by a shroud of black velvet-like material, probably genuine Laconia weave judging by its lustre and lack of any water damage whatsoever. Similar tapestries adorned the walls, covered in embroidery of silvery threads - ancient and sinister-looking runes, the face in the water repeated over and over again, stars on fire... 

In the centre of the altar, a sword rested on a dark laerma-wood stand. Its blade was blackened laconia, as though burnt - not that anything she had ever heard of could burn laconia - with a hilt of red laerma-wood lacquer and matching red laconia-weave cords leading from the pommel. The symbols etched upon it were recognisably ancient Orakian. So, genuinely something that could ancestrally belong to her. She shrugged. It was immaculately wrought, probably lighter than it looked and ten times more lethal. 

Dark energy crackled around it as a warning when she reached for the hilt, coursing up her arm when she closed her hand around it anyway, then through her eyes and into her mind... the chanting rose to a frenzied crescendo that consumed everything as her senses crackled with black and red flame...

She cried out as she woke up, drenched in sweat, still choking on the smoke of an out-of-control fire. Immediately alerted to the presence of now very real danger, she looked down and saw that she had left a candle lit - she had been reading in bed, some of the library's oldest documented accounts of Orakio's life, when she suddenly fell asleep, imagery still rich in her mind, and evidently knocked the candle onto the floor, where it spread to the rug and was now trying to reach her curtains. She grabbed her knives from the wall, broke the window and jumped out, rolling to break her fall and yelling out at the staff, who immediately ran to put the fire out. Lena was already awake and running up to her, screeching and demanding an explanation. All relatively normal scenes. But she still felt the last fading echoes of the nightmare, chilling her soul more than the icy gales of the star-filled night sky.

“… Go and live in the inn if you want to burn somewhere down, you lush!” snapped her mother, “Are you listening to me?”

“Alisia above, I was not drunk,” she snapped.

“And just what is an Alisia? Is it something that you saw in the most valuable book in Satera’s library that you left in the room you set on fire?”

“I don’t know, mother, because I’m not going anywhere near that accursed book, and I’ve half a mind to leave this forsaken land altogether – there’s something haunted here, and it’s doing things to my mind!”

Lena’s face, already a furious scowl, darkened, looking a lot more worried. Her voice lowered as she said, “Well, if there’s a curse following you, there isn’t anywhere you’ll be safe, and there are a lot worse places to stay and weather the storm than in your home, with your family and friends, and all the greatest Orakian Knights who are trained to fight darkness like this.”

“All our strongest warriors are away, and you won’t admit you have no idea where,” replied Sari. Her own voice wavering a little now she knew she was being taken seriously. It should have made her more confident but somehow all it did was make her nightmare more real, that other people were also giving it some credulity.

“I told you before – your uncles are defending their provinces, Princess Thea and the Lunar Twins are on some sort of mission in Aridia, your cousin’s in Terminus...”

“Oh, so you know that last fact, hm?”

Lena sighed, “I… saw it in a dream. Except he was in white robes, like the oldest priests, and he was wielding a lot more powerful techniques, and… and there was this… thing…” she looked her daughter straight in the eyes, “You had a dream as well, didn’t you?”

Sari nodded, “Prince Ayn wasn’t in it. Mostly it was just me and the… whatever it was…”

Lena watched her shudder, then nodded, “It’s cold out here, and the fire’s out. Let’s go back in and see if anything survived.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“I don’t really mind if you need a drink right now. As long as you pour me one as well.”

Sari shook her head, “Don’t want to go back to sleep. Coffee now. And a good work-out.”

“That’s probably wise,” said Lena, “I don’t think the book is really a problem, you know. I had the dream and there was no book in my room. You shouldn’t run away, though, not if you want to face this head on, with a proper strategy, and with your allies around you.”

“I’m a lousy strategist,” she admitted.

“Hey, Sari…”

“Yeah?”

“Was Mieu a cat in your dream too?”

She shook her head, “I had a pink dress on, though.”

“Now that’s a sight I’d like to see.”


	5. 5 - Thea - Hatazak

Lune was relieved, if rather surprised, when Thea emerged from the whirlpool not long after her descent. Her towering but surprisingly graceful draconic bulk rocketed from the pool, clearly propelled by a much greater force than the one she had fought against going in, which almost didn't want her to descend, against all logic of how whirlpools should work. A great jet of steaming water poured out of her mouth like a geyser and she twirled around in a spiral of gleaming scales, like one of the mythical dragons of the seasons and the moons, whipping droplets of water that shone with the same green fire in Aridia’s fierce sun. As his bride-to-be glided lazily down on the currents, circling behind him and alighting at his side, he wondered what the sun actually was in this strange system where everything was artificial and carefully managed and the moons weren’t even moons. Was there a vast furnace somewhere, staffed by the horned giants he occasionally saw roaming the plains and eating tourists? He was also amused by the idea that dragons shook themselves down like dogs, drenching him with water that had heated to a rather uncomfortable temperature for someone who was used to a space station that was mostly kept cold as it was inhabited only by machines and political exiles that nobody cared about any more. His wavering attention was captured again by the sight of a passenger clinging to Thea’s neck – another beautiful woman, but not in the same way as his beloved Thea. This woman elicited something closer in his heart to worship, or at least fealty – it didn’t take him long to work out why. She looked exactly like his Queen Laya. It was like stepping back in time. Thea dipped her head to the ground to let the passenger off, then transformed back into her human form, a slender woman with verdant green hair similar to his own but well styled into flowing curled locks rather than the shaggy mess she still hadn’t forced him to start combing properly, wearing a blue and white tunic dress, heavily ruffled and laced, with a single large ruby around her neck that was, as one of the portal keys to the tunnel between worlds, as much tool as decoration. The other woman who looked so much like Laya even dressed like her, in a very traditional full-length red dress, with her blonde hair tied back with one simple leather cord. She even had the bow at her side that had become a symbol of Layan strength.

“You are the last person I expected to come and greet me, Lune!” she said, her smile one of fond recognition, “Did you escape your capture? But it has been too long for you to also be alive...”

Lune gave her a puzzled look, “You… you are truly Laya?”

“Sort of,” Thea sighed, “Come on, let’s get back inside the town. We have a lot to explain.”

They talked as they explained, then resumed their talk in the sparse foyer of the inn that was one of the few human commodities in Hatazak. By the end of the story, Lune was convinced it was really Laya, although the thought of his Queen (and though it was technically not the same person, he already knew that Laya was a title and had sworn to defend the Laya, not the individual people with that title) suddenly returning made him feel as disoriented as he had when he first emerged from his own cryostasis that he was not meant to escape from. Laya would not stop pressing him about the circumstances of his awakening. Traditionally, only Laya herself after successfully storming the moon, or Orakio after Laya had paid the ransom, had administrative access to release a captured General. Hackers had managed to breach the facility before and it was considered an underhanded and dishonourable but perfectly valid form of warfare but Laya was not convinced this was what happened.

“You heard a voice, you said?” she demanded, “And it was the voice that first told you it was a good idea to randomly slaughter Orakians without my permission?”

He nodded, “My eternal shame and dishonour, my Queen, I understand if you wish to execute me...”

“And lose a powerful General in the middle of a more dangerous battle than we’ve ever fought before? Your premature thawing has addled your brain,” she snapped, “Or maybe HE is still trying to work through you...”

“I thought we weren’t angry at Orakio any more,” Thea chipped in.

“Not Orakio. Anyway, if he’s awake, he’s masking his presence well,” said Laya, looking around warily, “But, Lune, you are not the only one to awaken recently.”

“Yeah, we found Siren. Already dealt with,” said Thea. Then she frowned, “We think...”

Laya shook her head, “No, there is yet another… the one who I now realise, to my own eternal shame, was behind this entire war. It was a stupid plan. A horrendously stupid plan, always doomed to end like this… Why did we ever trust the Guild with something like that in the first place...”

“What’s the Guild done now?” Thea facepalmed.

“Doomed us all,” she said, “And not quickly. It isn’t even fully awake, or we’d already be dead. It’s been whispering to everyone, fanning the flames of war, and we’ve done nothing about it in our rush to slay our own allies… but at least we know, now… we can...”

It was Alair, for the most part silent throughout the whole conversation, only watching with a shrewd look on her face that told them she was processing and analysing every word, every facial expression, every slight body language, who caught Laya before she fell to the floor. Her normally pale face was now ghostly white. Her eyes had rolled back into her head. Mental agony written on her creased features, she whispered, in a strangled voice, “It’s loose. It’s finally loose. The idiot came back for his sword. No, it’s not him… someone else… no, even that hasn’t gone right...”

“Nobody knows what you’re talking about,” Thea pointed out.

Just as Laya fell into unconsciousness, the town’s attack siren went off. The cyborgs were milling at the gates, firing lasers and lashing out with blades and claws. However, they were losing – something danced among them, quick and lethal as the searing desert wind bringing a sandstorm with it. Machines fell with their limbs sheared, or became burned-out husks when they were hit by powerful attack techniques. Lune and Alair stood protectively over Laya but Thea ran out, already a dragon even though the sudden transformation destroyed the inn’s roof. By the time she shook her spiked head-frill loose from the shattered oak beams, the town was silent again, except for the grating, distorted, static screams of a furious, malfunctioning machine. For a split second she expected it to be Siren. Then she remembered another such cyborg who existed much closer to home and had just as much reason to hate Laya enough to indiscriminately kill anything in her path to reach the object of her animal loathing.

It was like looking into Mieu’s eyes, if Mieu had lost the synth-skin and metal plating from half her face, leaving cut, sparking cables, fried, exposed circuits and a dull, cracked red light where her eye would be, still pulsing on and off. Also if Mieu’s facial expression was all insane, murderous rage and a thousand years of pent-up anguish and regret. 

Before Thea could open her fanged maw to comment, the cyborg screamed with a voice like a starship’s main cannon firing, then rushed the door, slashing with her claws at anything remaining between her and Laya, even if it happened to be twice her size and capable of breathing fire. 

“Don’t damage the claws!” yelled a voice, and an arrow whined past Thea’s hand and hit the cyborg full in the chest. She was knocked back with an indignant yelp, but quickly picked herself back up and hurled a Thu technique at Thea’s head. A Deban-shield appeared, cast by Laya as she ran out of the building, dodging a loosened rafter that nearly fell on her, yelling orders at them while she circled the robot, loosing arrow after arrow. She showed no signs of her earlier pain that had been enough to drop her. This must be what it meant to be a true leader in battle, thought Thea, not to let anyone down by being away for long, not appearing weak for more than a moment unless you were trying to catch someone off guard. Lune and Alair were already used to fighting as a pair, and with their old leader back, they seemed especially synchronised to the flow of the battle. Thea was not used to following orders and she felt like a liability, uncoordinated as she was, not even fully used to her new form yet, but she did the best she could, inspired by the thought of fighting alongside Laya Herself. 

Inevitably, quite quickly in the heat of battle, the already heavily malfunctioning cyborg, ferocious but suddenly outnumbered by powerful opponents, began to falter more, her systems failing one by one as they were shredded by claws and slicers, her left leg torn from her by a well-aimed arrow to the socket. Sparks flew from her open wounds, the service light she had in place of an eye flashing even faster. The sounds she made as she tried to talk were no longer recognisable as a human language. As Miun fell, the light in her eyes now a broad, bright red pulse, Laya yelled at them to get out of the way, then loosed an arrow that hit the cyborg in the red jewel in the middle of her chest. It cracked, pierced at its heart, then turned dark. Laya walked forwards, bent down, then nodded her head and motioned them all forwards.

"Some of this model android have been known to self-destruct to evade capture," explained Laya, "I have grown adept at recognising the signs, through helping my sister in her senseless but inevitable war. And now we know this machine has important information hidden away in her black box."

"My claw," whispered the cyborg suddenly, her voice distorted both by critical damage and bitter, world-weary humour, the first trace of real emotion that Miun had displayed. Laya blinked in surprise and leaned closer so she could hear, despite Lune's shocked waves of protest - this could so easily be a trap and their Queen was literally shoving her face into it! 

"It's what you need to save the ship," explained Miun, in-between snarls of feedback that sounded like dying coughs, "Give it to my sister. I know she's with you. We're linked. And Siren... go and get his gun off him... if he resists..."

"Siren is still alive?" asked Laya.

"He retreated while your Prince was... being a fool, and doing everything in the wrong order," she laughed, then convulsed, letting out a shower of sparks, "Systems critically failing..."

"You must be a demon of war to survive these injuries for so long," said Laya, bowing in the traditional Layan gesture of respect to an opponent deemed worthy, one of those little rituals that she suspected the Orakians also unknowingly still had. The response was another laugh.

"You will meet real demons soon enough," she promised, then closed her eyes for the final time, all her service lights going dark, her body shuddering once more then going deathly still, now just a hollow titanium shell.

One of the few cyborgs left alive in Hatazak poked their head out of the doorway of the weapons shop, where they had been defending their armoury. Deciding that the threat was now gone, they all poured out of their hiding places and began picking up their dead. Lune yelled at them and grabbed one of them when he realised how they were treating the fallen. The cyborg turned around and gave him a blank look, not putting down the part he had disconnected from the corpse and attempted to plug into himself.

"Your problem?" he demanded, "These are good parts, the sort we could commonly replace and share among each other anyway. These are hard times and we do not have many more functional spare parts. What we do not reuse, we will melt down as scrap, then cast into more parts. We may even be able to build a new life if we can salvage the CPUs."

"By cannibalising the dead?" Lune snarled, not letting go of the robot's wrist.

"Sir, our bodies do not work like yours and do not mean the same to us as yours does to you. If you interfere again with our crucial salvage mission..."

"Stand down," Laya ordered. Lune released the android but continued glaring at him, his face like stone. 

"You will at least not defile the Lady Miun."

Another robot, higher in command by the superior quality of his weapons and armour - unless, Lune thought with a growl, he had just taken them from the battlefield - locked eyes with him, his gaze unblinking and impassive. He was clearly not in the mood for pretending to be human.

"We do not use parts from a cyborg who has malfunctioned in a way we cannot detect and do not know is not contagious," explained the cyborg, talking slowly as if explaining something for the fifth time to a particularly slow child, "However, we do need to retrieve the black box so we can scan its contents for clues - from behind our strongest firewalls, of course."

"And you will report to me what you find out," said Laya, also in no mood for arguing, "It is required information for our wider quest that is vital for the security of the entire ship. For instance, the whereabouts of General Siren, who I was not immediately informed was still alive..."

"Because we had no blasted idea he was still alive, and the place was under attack practically as soon as we walked in," pointed out Thea.

The cyborg stared at Laya long and hard, then nodded, "You came from the whirlpool, correct? You are the important treasure that Orakio tasked us to protect."

"He... he really said that? In those words?" Laya, up until now the image of the stern Warrior Queen, looked taken aback, as vulnerable as she had been when she was struck by a vision. Thea laughed.

"Sounds like the Demon King was a smooth talker. Well, you learn something new every day."

Laya glowered at her, "The 'Demon King' would do well to remember that it is my sister, not I, who falls for such things! Although," she frowned, "I do not think I will see either of them again."

"Sorry, that was insensitive of me. Waking up in a time and place that isn't your own must be tough."

Laya sighed, then gestured, with a sweep of her arm, at everything around her, "See this? What this land has become? We did this, my sister and Orakio and I. We deserve no pity."

"Companionship, then," said Lune, bowing to one knee and offering her his hand, "I will share your burden as your champion. Although," he added swiftly, after seeing the rather draconic glare Thea gave him, "I am afraid you cannot be my all and everything any more."

"And what does that make me?" demanded Alair. 

The cyborgs had already wisely retreated with the black box, after using the distraction to drag away the corpses to be salvaged somewhere else, in peace, away from the noisy and occasionally unnecessarily violent humans.


	6. 6 - Rulakir - Lashute

"Something bad has happened to my sister," Mieu declared suddenly.

Ayn flinched, startled. They had been hiding out for most of the day, now, waiting for any sign of human activity in or around the cursed floating city. So far, all they had seen entering or leaving Lashute were winged demonic creatures or airborn machines of one kind or another. As night fell, the setting sun was distorted by the still faintly cracked barrier that occasionally pulsed with a red light that refracted when it hit the tiny imperfections, sending pulsating veins of red through the dark pink smear that already seemed sinister, somehow malevolently alive, in the tense atmosphere of Terminus where every shadow seemed about to jump out and devour them. Ayn did not doubt that the true terrors of Terminus came out at night and he was more impatient than ever to escape before they emerged - not that the situation was likely to be much better, he thought. In fact, as the other presence, huge and unknown, grew larger and more active, he wondered if there was any worse possible place to hide. His growing dread was mitigated only by the corresponding appearance of several new life forms on the map that the radar was convinced were human. They had most probably teleported in, according to the presence of recently used technique residue in the ether. The teleport shield between Terminus and the outside world was still as impenetrable as ever, even with the physical shield still wavering a little, so it was most logical to assume they had warped in from somewhere on the outskirts of Terminus, out of the radar's range. Ayn had begun to creep closer to them, taking advantage of their extremely regular movement pattern, most likely a military formation or religious procession, that had actually thrown him off recognising them as human at first, so well co-ordinated it was. Then he had been distracted by Mieu's words and had immediately crouched down behind a bush and stopped. If something was bothering Mieu, it was more important to him than their overall mission, assuming of course that her fine senses, based upon the feline she often moved similarly to, hadn't actually picked up something that was currently an immanent threat to them.

"Your sister Miun, who we met in Aridia?" asked Ayn. She nodded. He had not met any more in her series of cyborg but knew that she had been created as part of a unit, if not a unit that tended to fight together. 

"We are linked together on an emergency frequency," she explained, "She refuses to use it, despite the repairs she clearly needs. Her logic circuits have also been malfunctioning and she has reported herself to have recently become hostile and attacked someone she should not have. Her systems are completely offline. Either she has cut off all contact - something we only do to mark ourselves as severely compromised and warning others in our unit away from us - or she did not survive the battle. It is impossible to tell."

"I am sorry," said Ayn, not sure what to do in this situation. Mieu's expression was downcast and morose but it was impossible to tell quite how her model cyborg reacted to loss, whether they required time and space to grieve, whether they considered a sympathetic show of affection to be welcome or patronising or even an attempt to take advantage of them. Stars above, it was hard enough to tell that of another person, let alone a cyborg. He decided upon simply waiting quietly, watching her, keeping his expression suitably grave. He considered asking her a question that was worded as neutrally as he could make it, apologising for his ignorance if the reaction seemed tense - was there anything he could do for her, did she need time, was there a protocol she was required to observe? 

It was complicated, he imagined, by the lack of certainty that she was definitely gone. Sometimes it could feel worse, to never be sure if someone close to you is alive or dead, if they're still suffering, if they genuinely can't be helped or if there's any possible way to save them whatsoever, no matter how far-fetched the probability of success or insane the risk to your own life or the accomplishment of the overall mission... then he realised that the situation was likely very similar regarding himself, with his loved ones back home. Maia was most likely going spare, all her time taken up by preventing her husband from running off to rescue his son despite his advanced age. Ayn remembered the story she loved telling her son, of the time his father had been locked in a dungeon by his grandfather to stop him mobilising an army and storming the nearest Layan settlement as a response to her being kidnapped by someone he didn't even know for certain was Layan and not, say, a third party trying to start a war on purpose. There would be inevitable political repercussions to him being away for so long as well. So many opportunist lordlings mistakenly thinking he wasn't coming back and that this was a good chance for them to make their own move for the throne. This had happened before and it almost always involved large amounts of pain at the hands of Maia, or if she wasn't available, Lyle usually came over swiftly to deal with it, or Thea, or, if they were especially unfortunate, Sari and her knives. Still, it would be complicated and messy and nobody involved would be able to sleep peacefully. 

Truth be told, he didn't want to think about it, and felt guilty for being distracted from Mieu's potential need for comfort by the unwelcome but needling thoughts. It would affect her when the two of them were wed, though - and he was firmly resolved that it was a 'when' - as she would inevitably end up being dragged into the political in-fighting in some way, no matter how hard he worked to protect her or how often she hissed at people and threatened them with her claws. 

"She left me another message," said Mieu suddenly, "Something about General Siren. She wants to know if I remember where he went when he retreated, if he took his weapon with him or if we retrieved it, or if it was abandoned at the site of the battle."

"Siren escaped?" Ayn gave her a confused look.

"According to her, apparently so. Miun was higher ranking than me, so unlike me, she had a direct line to the Generals. Not high enough rank to have the facility to track Siren, unfortunately, but she receives automated messages to say he is critically damaged but still alive, and is on the retreat."

"You still share way more information than my army ever shares even with me. If they were losing, they'd try to hide it from me, to avoid punishment from me, or to stop it happening by pretending it isn't, or something," he sighed, "So, you don't know the answer either?"

Miun shook her head, "And it is no longer possible to transmit information to her in any case. I believe it was more of a warning. Something is about to happen regarding General Siren that we cannot ignore."

"Something else, you mean," he sighed, "Well, I'm not sure what we can do about it if we're stuck here and we have no idea where Siren is in any case."

"We will not be here for long. Our prey is near," she told him. 

He whipped his head around and saw a bobbing electronic light, then the outline of a tall figure in dark robes, swinging the light on the end of a tall metal pole like an old-fashioned lantern. Part of their ritual, he guessed. They were moving slowly in a very precise formation, chanting softly as they did so - he just about recognised the language as a mixture of Guild cant, which was basically very archaic and rather specialised Orakian, and the foul speech of the demons, which, come to think of it, could just be equally ancient Layan that he had still not shaken off his conditioning to feel nervous about, despite the fact that he technically cast his techniques in it. They looked like a small unit of around twenty-four, too many for the three of them to take at their current power level; the potential foes themselves registered as sources of powerful technique use. Diplomacy would probably be the best option; either that, or a silent hit-and-run attack on the rear. Absorbed as they were in their ritual, having obviously taken this route countless times before, they didn't seem all that interested in looking around them. Unless they had senses he didn't know about, magical or electronic or a mixture of both. 

Diplomacy was the best bet, then, but he wasn't sure how to approach them. His last attempt at communicating with unknown life had ended up with him accidentally startling them into attacking him - although the goats didn't show any signs of realising their mistake or trying to talk when the battle was obviously going downhill for them, so he still wasn't sure if they were ever capable of reason. If that happened this time, the three of them would probably not survive the initial barrage. As well as readied attack techniques, he saw shapes under their robes that looked a lot like Wren's heavy armour and big gun. Besides, he didn't imagine any fanatical cultist would want their ceremony interrupted to talk to someone who had no business being there. Maybe following them for a while longer, possibly capturing one as they were forced through a narrower path after all, even dressing up as one of them? After all, they hadn't noticed him so far...

"Ah, yes, we have noticed you, Protector, and we are paying a lot more attention than you think. No, we cannot read your thoughts, only know your plans from your face," said a loud, booming voice, like an announcement made by a human speaking over a tannoy, "You've made an awful lot of noise since coming here, you know. And, incidentally, the reason you aren't dead a thousand times over already is because you were expected. In fact, we would very much like you to come with us as our honoured guest. Right now. Before I cast Shimb on you and drag you behind me by a rope."

Every single cultist was now surrounding him, some of them hovering above the bushes, some of them with bolts of several different elements shimmering in their hands waiting to be hurdled, others with guns pointed at them. He wondered how they had gotten around them so easily, why there were twice as many of them now, but then quickly put two and two together: silent teleportation. No, completely undetectable teleportation. That was how they were in here at all.

“Perceptive of you,” said the voice, “That sharp intellect is why I have taken an interest in you at all. I am trusting in you to see beyond what you think is obvious. Because you are about to unearth a horrible truth about this world that you weren’t even supposed to be the recipient of – and every single thing it will tell you is a lie.”

“I have no idea what you’re saying,” Ayn called out.

“Then join me as a guest and I will show you the real truth.”

* * *

Ayn's surrender - a difficult decision to make and one that Mieu strongly disagreed with, protesting at the cloying stench of the dark patina that suffused all of them, something Ayn could not detect as a less practiced technique user, although Wren agreed with Ayn that continuing a struggle where they were impossibly outnumbered and had been offered what seemed like a sincere parley was senseless - was enough to allow him into their teleport circle. Most of the procession insisted on winding up the mountain in a spiral while chanting some more but the small party guarding Ayn, significantly reduced now he didn't seem to be resisting, had apparently been allowed to enter straight away as their master, whoever that was, had asked to see them straight away with an urgency greater than their usual ritual obesiance. 

"We do not worship Him," corrected the Captain of the squad, or priest of the acolytes, or both, Ayn was unsure exactly what their hierarchy was supposed to be. Upon closer inspection, his robe was decorated with several eppaulettes in silver brocade, over a smart red uniform with medals stitched onto the lapel of his jacket. The Guild crest, a ship's wheel over three cogs inside two unfurled wings, was also emblazoned there in silver. His hair was the faint silver-blue of a much older Layan, leaving Ayn unsure whether he was a younger man who had experienced something shocking or sacrificed something of his life energy, or an older man whose dark pacts had included sacrificing something much worse in exchange for an extended youth. He seemed to be quite happy to chat with Ayn as they walked down Gothic corridors, silent except for chanting and the footfalls of more Guild cultists, some of them women in traditional yellow robes, "It is a lot more complicated a contract."

"You haven't even told me who 'He' is," Ayn pointed out.

"I have been ordered not to speak His name until He has chance to explain Himself to you in person," he said, "He has reason to believe you will react badly, that you might strike out at us."

"That's not reassuring. You haven't exactly ingratiated yourself with us already."

"Precisely, so it would not be wise to tell you the exact thing you probably do not want to know about us," he said, turning the corner into a vast indoor garden, with leaves so pale and fragile they looked as though they had been petrified. Everything was laid out in neat rows to form a maze that Ayn suspected was also some kind of ritual walkway. So much of it was about mazes and labyrinths, to lead people around in circles, obscure the truth, wrap deeper layers within every meaning. There was a surprising beauty to it, though, despite the glowing eyes and skittering shapes he kept seeing behind every bush, the sounds he heard, none of it natural, all of it seeming larger and more horrific even than the things on the surface of Terminus, although the monsters here all seemed to skulk around the edges of the cultists' home as if they were tame, or at least had been persuaded to tolerate each others' presence as equally terrifying denizens of Lashute. Yes, this would have been serene once, a place of meditation, of prayer and rumination on deeper matters, high above the clouds where the Guild could maintain the ship without the distractions of material life, until something had happened. Ayn was frustrated that they wouldn't tell him what.

"I am permitted to tell you this, though: the figure is more like the permanent highest in our order, someone who is an entire magnitude closer to divinity than ourselves, than the actual object of our worship. He is eternally part of our blessed Homeland, by necessity, perhaps by definition, you see."

"He's part of the ship? So, the ship's AI?" guessed Wren. Their host laughed and shook his head.

"No, not the ship. Our true homeland. Our place of exile," he smiled, "The place we abandoned. Not really our choice, of course, but then, when were we ever in control of our destiny, broken or otherwise, virtuous or sinful?"

"Weren't you people literally just talking about breaking free from destiny, or truth, or something?" prompted Ayn.

"Oh, that was Him. He sees a lot of things we cannot comprehend. And his message was only to you. We? We are doomed. We were the moment we left the confines of our solar system, the scope of the forces of true destiny that could have still added us to its history books."

"You are referring to the ship's original exodus, over a thousand years ago," said Wren, "Our ship fled a great disaster that made one of the planets uninhabitable."

"The planet was completely destroyed," corrected the cultist. They had left the garden and turned down another grand corridor, a balcony overlooking the lower terrace. Another garden further ahead, on a higher level, was just visible, "Do you know what our world was called?"

"Such records are lost..." began Wren, but he was interrupted by the smiling cultist shaking his finger.

"Algol," he told them, "It means 'pain'. And do you know what pain is for?"

"A survival mechanism in biological life to warn of systems failure," replied Wren, "As a machine with in-built sensors that constantly stream out damage reports, it is obsolete for me, although I am sometimes required to visibly show I am damaged when it is not otherwise necessary when fighting in a unit where the medics are human."

"Quite correct, machine-brother. And yes, we respect all of this ship's systems, mobile or no, traditionally intelligent or no. It would be a great benefit to the entire world if you could join us," the cultist smiled, "However, you missed out one factor: to biological life, pain reminds us that we are alive, that we can still feel, that we react to things around us, that we're still there. To go numb is to admit you've lost contact with your body, with yourself."

"So, do you, like, have pain rituals?" asked Ayn.

"No, vulgar Prince, we do not. But we remind ourselves daily of the pain that most Algolians have spent centuries trying to forget about: that we're Algolian. That we've left our home and we probably can't go back."

"My dad was kicked out of his home," said Ayn, "Well, he escaped prison, but it'd have been a bad idea for him to go back. He just got on with his life, did the things he couldn't have done at home. He didn't expect to go back home, you know, even before he knew Maia lived in Cille. He was always planning to run away with his bride, somewhere away from the father who locks his son up."

"And you think Algol is like an unwelcoming father? Then you have truly lost your history," the cultist sighed, "No, we ran away from responsibility and there are no excuses for us. There were three planets, you know. Possibly four, according to some astronomers. There were already settlements on the other planets. We could have just gone there."

"Maybe the trajectory was wrong or the other settlements were crowded or something. They probably didn't have time to think clearly," Ayn shrugged, "The planet was about to blow up!"

"Who said anything about exploding? I only said it was destroyed," the cultist smiled again, "See? It's there in your deepest memories. Your Algolian racial memories."

"Maybe? Such things happen," Ayn shrugged, "But still, it's been a thousand years. Orakio knows how many generations. We're probably on the other side of the galaxy by now. Even if it was still our responsibility, what exactly do you expect me to do?"

"There's a wormhole," said another voice, "A wormhole I can still navigate into. I've kept the maps. Actually, they've been directly uploaded into my brain."

Ayn looked up to the terrace above him, around another winding passage just outside the second garden. Dancing around the tall, proud figure were several living flames in vivid oranges, blues and purples. He was even taller than the other cultists, his bright blonde hair in the same style, and Ayn had the impression that the others modelled themselves on this man who held himself like a powerful figure of authority. A long yellow cape hung down from a heavy green breastplate, under which he also had a red tunic. All of this was more heavily and intricately brocaded with looping, swirling designs that had a look somewhere between organic and mechanical, and became more elaborate around a cluster of red and green jewels on one side of his cape that were profusely technique-charged. Portal keys, Ayn recognised, overcharged and networked to others by some kind of mechanism that the filigree was actually delicate but strong Laconia wiring for. So that was how they were getting in and out... Another particular marking gave Ayn the biggest clue to as to the identity of this man: a large Guild crest in the middle of his breastplate, emblazoned with a single large yellow sapphire that also pulsed with stored technique energy. A very high ranking Guild elder, possibly even the Guildmaster.

"Rulakir?" guessed Ayn.

"You will address the Master respectfully," said the man beside him.

"No need. He is an outsider. I care not whether he knows the first thing about Guild law," Rulakir waved his subordinate away, "You should know how rare and fortunate it is for an outsider to ever meet me, however, not to mention the Demigod who is the only one above me."

"With all due respect, I would advise against flying the ship anywhere near a wormhole," said Wren.

"Normally, you would be quite correct, but this is no ordinary situation," Rulakir told him, "Did I not mention we have assisting us a Demigod of Algol?"

Suddenly, Wren's pulse laser charged up, and he hissed, "Prince Ayn! I think I've worked out who this 'Demigod' has to be..."

Rulakir sighed, "Guildsman Ryker, do not play inane mystery games with these honoured guests. They're not idiots. Yes, you most probably have guessed it by now. Our new Demigod is the one known as Dark Force."


	7. 7 -  Lena  - Landen

"The fact that you're even bothering to ask me first should alert you to the fact that something's very wrong with what you're trying to do," said Lena.

"I am aware of the danger, yes," replied her daughter, "That's why, for the first time in my life, I feel the need to plan this out properly. Is that not what you actually wanted me to do?"

"If you were thinking this through," Lena told her, "You would never entertain such a stupid idea. This dream happened immediately before your bedroom set on fire. You know what the thing reaching out to you is likely to be? You know the legends surrounding that place are, yes? And even if the Dark Force is just a myth, historians know for a fact that's Orakio's sword. What makes you think you have any right to pull it out? Apart from a voice in your mind during a dream you know is cursed, that could be any Layan mind-magic working its spell on you."

"Lord Orakio did not wait for confirmation that he was worthy of that blade," she pointed out, drawing her own knives and idly playing with them between her fingers, "He took it into his hands, then went out and fought evil with it until nobody could dent that he was worthy of it. And that is what I intend to do. If there is something waiting below the waves for me, something that speaks in the minds of unwary sleepers and starts fires in my beautiful Satera... well, then, it is my sworn duty as an Orakian Princess to hunt it down and drive it out, just as I would any beast or rampaging robot. And as for Layans... you are usually the one to remind me that they are no longer our enemies." 

"Officially, no, but there are still remnants out there, people who did not get the message or refuse to lay down arms. Up until now, Queen Thea's husband was one such remnant, although that appears to have resolved itself quite nicely. We must still keep our guard up around strange Layans, though, whatever grand dreams of world peace King Rhys has," she shook her head, "Sari, this isn't just another Megatoad grown too large or Agribot with a sudden taste for harvesting human souls. Our Layan ambassador - the one we actually trust - has confirmed there is some very powerful, very ancient and very evil work down there. Whether or not you fancy yourself the next Orakio - I honestly worry about your sanity sometimes, girl - it will take more than one hunter. Or one hunter and a woman with no real talent for combat."

"You underestimate yourself, mother, I have seen your aim with a needler pistol," said Sari, "But you are correct. I do need more. I need your permission to take out the Royal Guard, and also some kind of submersible craft, technique-user who can breathe underwater or other way of travelling below the waves. Surely such a thing exists. Otherwise, how would the forefathers have built a palace underwater in the first place?"

"How? Because - and you would know this if you actually read the book rather than dreaming of being a legendary hero - the palace was there before the lake. In fact, the sudden explosion large enough to form a crater that was filled in with water over the years was what alerted the people to the existence of something very wrong in that temple. Everyone who went down to investigate - or to rob the place, as some people have no sense, apparently - never came back. Then it was ordered flooded by Orakio himself. If he planned to ever unseal it again, he probably had some technology lost to us now. No, child, I have no submersibles or potions of underwater breathing hidden under my skirts."

Sari sighed, "So, I have no choice to believe in the dream. The dream that implied I was always supposed to do this alone in the first place."

"The dream that also heavily implied it was a bad idea to do so?" Lena reminded her.

She shook her head firmly, "However bad an idea it is to go down there, it's a worse idea to ignore the fact that whatever sleeps there is stirring, and right next to a major town of my Kingdom."

"Something that probably wants to wake it up."

"Better myself than someone with bad intentions."

"And what are your intentions next - should you actually succeed in this still barely thought out plan and return both alive and in possession of your own will and soul? What do you actually wish to do with this sword?"

"I'm going to find out what the voice was talking about," said Sari, "Who the hell 'Alis' is - or was - and why the name came to me even though I've never heard it in my life. Why you had the same dream. What Ayn and Mieu have to do with this. Why this thing is even trying to talk to us and tell us something useful if it's just an embodiment of pure evil and temptation and destruction."

"In other words, you're going on some kind of harebrained quest, like Ayn and Thea and almost everyone else of your generation I know," she sighed, "Including some people a lot older who should know better."

"Just like you did whenever you needed to pull King Rhys' ass out of the fire back in the day?"

"That was different! It was an emergency, and I wasn't supposed to go far, and it wasn't my fault that idiot..." she sighed and shook her head, "Look, at least please don't do this right away without backup. Either find Thea - she was in Aridia last time I asked - or find one of the cyborgs. They're the only two sensible choices I can think of if you're going to go deep sea diving."

"So, in other words, go to Aridia either way."

"If you're not prepared to go to one of the closest and easiest to travel to worlds on the map, you're not going to make a very good adventurer."

Sari sighed, "This better not just be a distraction while you pull something on me, and you better not just be worried about Thea."

"And if I am? She's almost as bad as you. And if you can't defeat me in a battle of wits..."

"Then I'm going to be no use in a battle against an arch-deceiver from the dawn of time. I know," she sighed, "Although, to be fair on me, you're scarier than Dark Force sometimes."

"I don't know what you're talking about. Now, I've already made arrangements for the correct jewels to be available at the gate. If you head off now, you should be able to reach Aridia before night falls. That'll keep you out of the worst trouble."

Sari sighed, wondering who exactly had won the argument. It was impossible to tell sometimes, with her mother. Still, it was a step towards her goal.

The water seemed to glimmer in a very specific point on the sea outside Ilan in a way that couldn’t be justified by the position of the sun.


	8. 8 -  Ayn - Lashute

I warned you they would react badly," the Guild cultist known as Rykr sighed as Ayn immediately drew his sword from its sheath. Mieu hissed, her hands in the gloves of the claw weapons as she crouched into a battle stance, and Wren charged up his pulse laser rifle. The man who claimed to be Guildmaster Rulakir did not even flinch, but waved them away as though they were of no consequence.

"They have not even gathered the required weapons," he pointed out, "None of them. They did not plan properly to come here, they were not destined to come here and, most probably, they do not want to be here. Is that not so?"

"Hey, we have a very good reason to be here!" Ayn yelled at him, "And we hoped you would be just the person to help us, but... are you completely insane or do you honestly hate every living thing on the ship? THE Dark Force? You honestly think that's something you can just side with all of a sudden, and that it'll work and ever be a good idea? Do you even know the legends of the sort of devastation that thing has wrought?"

"I should think I know a lot more than you," Rulakir sighed, "After all, I have access to rather older records than you, hidden in the vaults of this place. Did you know that Dark Force was said to have destroyed the planet that we all fled from in the first place? If that's so, how do you think He's even here on this ship today? Has He been hiding all along, do you think, or is He powerful enough that his reach has always extended this far out into the cosmos, simultaneously acting in several regions of the galaxy at once... or is there not one Dark Force but an entire species of them? This seems the most likely explanation to me, I must admit, as there are so very few things in the Universe it would make sense for there to be only one of," he sighed, "But I am also fond of my more poetic explanation... that Dark Force is the side of Algol that we don't want to see, don't want to admit. And that we haven't quite left Algol behind entirely - not in our hearts and souls, at least, and what is distance when it comes to the lost and lonely mind of the homesick exile, who has recreated one single perfect freeze frame of the home they left within their heart?"

"I think a good part of it might be how delusional you've all gotten, isolated with only yourselves, holed away in a place like this, with your traditions not changing for longer than all of us can remember," Ayn told him, "This 'Dark Force' could be any reasonably good illusionist manipulating you... can't you see what kind of madness they've already led you to commit?"

"Madness, corruption... he practically invented them within the lesser species, you know," Rulakir told him, "His first name... before it changed to 'Dark Falz' and then 'Dark Force' and then, briefly and rather predictably, 'Dark Phallus'... it was 'Dark Fallacy'. He was the insidious error that crept in between the smallest of cracks, that widened them until civilisation began to fall apart from one misprint... from one sudden, wild notion of a ruler that expanded to become something a lot further reaching than it ever had a right to be..."

"Still doesn't sound like a good perssn to trust," pointed out Ayn.

"Normally? Of course not. But there was one thing you could always say about the Dark Fallacy: He was always there. Always part of Algol, at the very core of its identity, its reason to exist. It was the eternal problem that drove Algol's story forward in endless cycles to drive Him back again, and at every turn, making both Algol stronger, then Himself stronger to match, then once again Algol stronger... and now He's even turned up to a part of Algol that's drifted so far away. And make no mistake, He has shown me with his own eyes that He is but one seed of His whole identity, the Profound Darkness that shields Algol from a blinding light that would make a whole world nothing but a harsh jail... and the others of Him are still very much where they should be, except for those that are also spreading their tendrils into cracks to find malicious weeds that would choke the life from Algol..."

"You're ranting, old man, I have no idea what you mean."

"No? Then let me simplify it for you: He has come before us as a black light beacon, to guide us safely home through the shoals of a broken destiny. And all we have to do is stop fearing the Darkness. Or maybe I should just allow Him to explain on His own... after all, He is about to awaken!"

Before Ayn could open his mouth again, Rulakir's eyes rolled back in his head, then became completely black, as if his pupils had expanded to fill the whole of his eyes. Then the sky-fortress began to shudder, warning sirens going off. The Guildmaster whirled around and gestured for Rhys to follow him through a door that had suddenly opened up behind him. 

Unsure what else to do, Rhys followed.

–

The balcony descended far into the sub-levels of Lashute and deep into systems that had been running non-stop to maintain systems of the ship so fundamental that they could not be exposed to the outside world in case anything should interfere with them whatsoever. Ayn finally understood why the Guild was as much like a cult as it was - this was the literal power keeping an entire world afloat, a tiny deity unto itself, and the silence, the reverence, the insistence on everything always being done perfectly was only sensible on a technical level as well as a mark of respect. At this level, the ship clearly looked like Ayn's impressions of a ship, from the oldest known diagrams in the deepest and most restricted archives. There was no adaptation to human comfort, no pretention to ever have been a place that welcomed humans, only vast, cold metal gantries with equipment that could be a gigantic engine running on some system of power so complex that it made the cyborg forces left behind by Orakio look like children's toys, readouts that looked like navigation windows into space, star charts that showed a much vaster world outside the lens around the dome that showed a simplified sky. Other readouts showed the life support systems of the ship, causing Ayn to jump every time he saw any kind of blip in the numbers, any light turn off or start flashing or go red, any bleep or siren... he wondered if this was how the tropical fish in his mother's pond would feel if they had the brains to be aware of their situation. As if he really had any more understanding of the scenario on a grander scale... He had seen the fish swim to the surface, watch those watching them, mill around at a time when they expected food, follow shadows, dart away from sudden movements. In the end, was the way they reacted to even the mildest disturbance to their snow globe of a world any different? Wren and Mieu also watched the numbers carefully, although they seemed more methodical, as though they at least had a clue what it all meant. He found himself reacting to their expressions instead, his heart lurching when Wren frowned and looked again to check a reading was really as it said, or when Mieu looked downright terrified at a light winking out. This isn't a place for me, he thought. But if it isn't for me, but it is for Mieu, does that mean we shouldn't be together? He had endured all of this horror with his own self intact, with the same wry smile on his face, and had not wavered or left Mieu's side. He would have to brave even more when the time came to make the final sacrifice - and despite all he had seen, he didn't intend to completely abandon that plan. If that was what it took to truly be equal to Mieu, to understand a cyborg as a person, he would learn about everything here, no matter how much it felt as though he was wandering too deep into a dark chasm where everything around him was a giant capable of snuffing out his brief, feeble life in an instant simply by moving too fast. She had done the same for him, coming into his world, enduring the pettiness and the politics, the ignorance of the wider scale of the world, as well as learning the skills of human emotion enough to express before he did the things he hadn't realised were in his heart concerning her.

No, he would reach the end of time if that was what it took. And, with the way everything still shook and roared down here, that felt like no idle boast.

Following Rulakir was in itself no easy feat. The man moved as though he had lived here all his life – although, seeing how easily he sprang from railing to platform to gantry, Ayn could not be sure if the man was actually still human enough to have his age guessed, or for it to mean anything that he was allowed to move so freely down here. The extensive mechanical augmentation hadn’t at all hindered his ability to use techniques either, as Ayn found out when something very large and powerful and screaming like a demon that had maybe once been female got loose and charged them briefly before having a hole punched straight through her head by a single Thu technique. 

This was, indeed, the correct person to ask about his delicate situation, much as he might want it to be anyone else in the world.

"I would advise very strongly against opening that box," Rulakir told him as he began to walk up to it. The box in question had been quite tempting, one of the ornately carved tea chests that invariably contained high-quality equipment, a tradition that seemed to extend to the most high technology regions of the ship, relics of the strange Gothic design that all the most important systems in the world had, as if even then they were considered Cathedrals as much as they were machine centres. This one seemed to glitter in an even more inviting manner than normal, with a particularly aesthetic light that somehow seemed right - he even heard soft chimes in his voice, as if the chest called out to him.

As soon as Rulakir spoke up, he realised how suspicious that was. When he actually looked, objectively, fighting against the songs that clouded his mind, he saw black smoke billowing from one corner of the box, a black aura around it, an ozone stench and a sensation within his technique-receptive areas of the brain that there was something dark and malicious being cast at a very high power level. Ayn jerked his hand away as if the lid of the chest was red hot. 

"Of course, you should be the one to unleash what's in there at the right time," said the Guildmaster, "But it isn't time yet, and you don't want to have to deal with His full power right now. I have taken steps that we can talk to Him indirectly, through one of the screens."

"You mean to tell me," Ayn folded his arms and looked at the Guildmaster with incredulity written over every inch of his face, "That you keep the ultimate embodiment of all the evil in an entire solar system... that you sneaked aboard your own ship on purpose... in a BOX?"

"It sounds silly when you put it like that, I agree, but I assure you it is traditional," Rulakir protested, "The box represents human greed and how easily tempted we are, you see. Or, in some versions of the myth, how our darkest desires only fester and percolate when we bottle up our negative emotions and deny that they exist. Of course, it is always an adventurer who inadvertently opens the chest, expecting the treasure, and unleashes all of the world's evils upon the unsuspecting populace."

"Except you rather spoiled it just now, didn't you?"

"Ayn, I'm sorry to have to say this, but you aren't the destined hero. If you were, mind you, our meeting would have been a lot less cordial. As I said, you don't even have the legendary weapons with you."

"There are legendary weapons?" Ayn scratched the back of his head."

"Look, you can still choose to perform the duties of a legendary hero if you choose to. You can get out your sword right now, open that box and challenge the Dark One. The weapons aren't STRICTLY necessary, they're just very, very powerful. You can probably do it with three of you, you're a lot more experienced than you would normally be at this stage of the adventure. I would have to fight you as well, of course, and two demons from your worst nightmare at once might be a bit much even for you," Rulakir allowed a burst of blue fire to idly play from one of his hands at this, "But, the thing about coming at a time other than the destined point in history, is you get to try out something else, maybe even re-route the course of destiny if you go about it the right way. And I get the impression you didn't come all this way just to be impatient about the whole 'epic destiny that technically your children are supposed to finish off, not you' thing. Especially as you really don't seem to know what you're doing in that regard. How did you even get here, anyway? We were trying for Sari."

"We crashed a space shuttle through the barrier. What do you mean? What're you trying to do to Sari?"

"That's her business and mine. And could become unnecessary if you just co-operate. Well, that was a security hole I never thought I'd even have to think of patching up," he sighed, "You really are ingenious. And desperate. So are you going to tell me what you actually came here for? Is it something to do with your cyborgs? They're beautiful models, aren't they?"

"They're not my cyborgs. If anything, I'm theirs," Ayn retorted, "And I'm not telling you anything about my private life until you finish telling me about this alleged Dark Force you've done nothing but rant on about. It's kind of important, assuming it's even real. What did you mean by it's starting to grow in power? Why is it glowing like that? Is it supposed to do that?"

"I don't control Him, you know," he sighed, "If He wants to glow, He'll glow. If He wants to devour our souls, well, I can't really stop Him."

"And you're entrusting the future of the ship and possibly our ancestral home to that thing?"

"Trust me, it's better than the alternative."

"IF YOU'LL EXCUSE ME, I'D RATHER EXPLAIN THAT PART MYSELF. YOU INVARIABLY GET THE FINE DETAILS WRONG, AND YOUR BICKERING IS STARTING TO DRAIN MY LIMITED PATIENCE."

Ayn jumped at the loud, booming voice inside his head. He whirled around, drawing his sword. Wren steadied his hand, warning him backwards. Mieu pointed up at the screen above the box. Where before it only showed a lot of readings that Ayn didn't really understand and assumed were just more technical details of keeping the ship afloat in the sky, he now saw an enormous, demonic scowling face, its maw all huge all-devouring fangs, its bestial eyes like dying stars in the cold emptiness of deep space. He had seen pictures of Dark Force in some ancient records but this was alive and in front of him and he knew instantly that it was real.

 

"Go on then, enlighten me," Ayn casually sheathed his sword again, giving Dark Force the same look he gave any enemy he was about to let out a scathing series of taunts at. Of course he was as afraid as he imagined anyone would be to find himself face to face with the literal embodiment of everything bad in the Universe who he didn't even believe existed a few seconds ago (admittedly, seeing it in a box kind of dampened the effect), but it wouldn't help to let his enemies know that they had successfully had any kind of psychological effect on him other than earning his usual ridicule, "Assuming you are truly Dark Force, what could there be in the Universe that is worse news than you?"

"OH, YOU KNOW VERY WELL THAT I AM THE TRUE DARK FORCE. RULAKIR, I THOUGHT I TOLD YOU TO BRING ME THE ALIS, BUT AS SHE IS EVIDENTLY STILL VERY BUSY, I WILL FORGIVE YOUR INABILITY TO TELL APART ALIS AND LUTZ. AND DO I DETECT A SUITABLE SUBSTITUTE MYAU?"

"With all due respects, Dark One, he came here by himself."

"Substitute... meow?" asked Mieu, "Like a cat? Are you trying to say my name or are you calling me a cat?"

"YOU DO AT LEAST APPEAR TO UNDERSTAND THAT IT IS DIRECTED AT YOU."

"Um, yes, I get called a cat a lot," she scratched her head, "Even by people who don't know my name. I'm not sure why."

"I told you why, it's because you're beautiful and sleek and elegant," said Ayn.

"Oh, so it's the Mieu-model one you like," Rulakir said, "I had detected... something... if that's so, may I borrow the Wren android for something?"

"No, you may not," said Wren, "And I must say your attitude to your mechanical partners is particularly outdated, surprisingly so for a man who reads as practically a machine himself."

"Oh, this is just generically how I treat people, don't worry, I meant no discrimination against you. Everyone in this city is mine to do with as I please, didn't you know?" Rulakir gave him an odd look, "Except for you, of course, Dark One."

"NO OFFENSE TAKEN. THIS IS EXACTLY THE ATTITUDE I LIKE TO FOSTER AMONG HUMANS. SO MUCH EASIER TO WORK WITH."

"You were trying to persuade us that there was something worse than you around," Ayn reminded Dark Force. 

"INDEED, I WAS, BUT I FOUND THE MATTER OF VERIFYING WHO EXACTLY I HAD IN FRONT OF ME A LOT MORE IMPORTANT. MY SENSES DO NOT WORK LIKE YOURS, YOU SEE. I CANNOT SEE OR HEAR YOU, I HAVE MY OWN WAYS TO REALISE WHO YOU ARE. YOU SAY THERE IS A WREN CYBORG? I SUPPOSE THAT COULD WORK AS A TYRONE. SO WE HAVE EVERYONE HERE EXCEPT THE ALISIA HERSELF," HE yawned, appearing to swallow a sun as he did so, "I SUPPOSE WE CAN BEGIN. ALTHOUGH I WOULD HAVE HOPED YOUR OWN SPACE MEMORIES WOULD IMPART THE KNOWLEDGE TO YOU. I MUST BE THE ONE TO JOG THEM FOR YOU, I SUPPOSE, AS THE ONLY THING LEFT HERE THAT IS THE SAME AS IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN."

"YOU UNDERSTAND AT LEAST THAT THERE IS A WRONGNESS, YES? THAT YOU WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO LEAVE THE SOLAR SYSTEM?"

"So I've been told. Wasn't it kind of your fault we had to, though?"

"I AM FLATTERED YOU BELIEVE ME CAPABLE OF THE ACT, BUT NO, THE FUNDAMENTAL FLAW THAT SUDDENLY TRIPPED WITHIN THE PLANET PALMA AT AN INFORMATIONAL LEVEL WAS NONE OF MY DOING. NEITHER WAS THE EXISTENCE OF MOTHERBRAIN IN THAT TIME OR PLACE, OR THE ABILITY OF THE INVADERS TO FIND THE SOLAR SYSTEM. NO, THAT WAS ALREADY SET IN MOTION OUTSIDE OF ALGOL, MAYBE OUTSIDE OF TIME AND SPACE, IN A MANNER THAT IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN NOW. AND THERE IS ONLY ONE OTHER THING THAT HAS EVER LEFT ALGOL."

"Talk less like a raving lunatic," prompted Ayn.

"THIS BLACK HOLE YOUR SHIP IS HEADED TOWARDS... TECHNICALLY IT IS A SUPERNOVA. A GREAT LIGHT. AND WHILE IT WILL PRODUCE A STABLE WORMHOLE, IT WILL NOT GO TOWARDS ALGOL... BUT TO A FRESH HELL KNOWN AS THE SOL SYSTEM."

"So we're not even going to Algol," Ayn sighed, "You've just admitted yourself that you aren't taking the Guild in the direction they wanted to go. Why are you two even co-operating?"

"I NEVER SAID I WOULD NOT GET THE SHIP BACK TO ALGOL IN THE END. TAKING THIS DETOUR IS REQUIRED. AS THINGS STAND, WE WILL NOT BE ALLOWED TO LEAVE HERE WITHOUT GOING THROUGH THAT WORMHOLE. MY PLAN WILL MERELY ENSURE THAT WE DO RETURN IN THE END, RATHER THAN BLINDLY GOING ALONG WITH THEIR WISHES FOR US," said Dark Force, "IF THEY HAVE THEIR WAY, THEN IN THE THIRD GENERATION, YOUR DESCENDANTS WILL COME FOR ME AND DEFEAT ME IN BATTLE. THE FORCES UNLEASHED BY THAT BATTLE WILL INCIDENTALLY KNOCK US OFF COURSE AND DAMAGE OUR EQUIPMENT SO THAT WE CAN NO LONGER CONTROL OUR ROUTE - OF COURSE, THIS WILL NOT ACTUALLY BE A COINCIDENCE, NOR WILL THE SHIP BE TRULY OUT OF ANYONE'S CONTROL. WITH ME GONE, THIS SHIP WILL HAVE NO PROTECTION AGAINST THE FORCES WAITING FOR YOU AT THE OTHER END OF THE WORMHOLE. THEY WILL NOT OVERTLY ATTACK YOU, OF COURSE, SO YOU WON'T EVEN REALISE WHAT IS HAPPENING TO YOU UNTIL IT IS TOO LATE TO PUT UP ANY KIND OF RESISTANCE. IN FACT, THE PROCESS THEY WILL FINALISE HAS ALREADY BEEN HAPPENING TO YOU FOR A WHILE NOW."

"So you're saying not to trust the people on the other side of a wormhole, who are probably several AU away and have no way of knowing what is happening right now, who will probably see a wrecked ship emitting a distress signal coming straight for their planet, that may or may not be carrying a space plague or overrun by alien dogs but it's always best to greet refugees with wary suspicion - assuming they have even evolved a concept of space flight yet and don't think we're some sort of sky gods? But of course we should trust the embodiment of all evil. In fact, we should pre-emptively attack them while they really have no clue we're here - by all the talk of our ancestors, not that this is likely to happen..."

"I told you I plan to build another cyborg to succeed me," said Mieu, giving him an annoyed look, then another at Rulakir who he raised his eyebrows at them.

"My point is, we're talking a long way into the future for a human."

"AS A MATTER OF FACT, YES, YOU CAN TRUST ME NOT TO DECEIVE YOU, IN THIS INSTANCE AT LEAST. I AM A CREATURE OF HABIT, MORE OF A FORCE THAT IS WHAT IT WILL ALWAYS BE BY DEFINITION. YES, I DECEIVE AND I CORRUPT AND I SLAUGHTER, BUT I AM A CREATURE OF ALGOL, SUBORDINATE TO ALGOL AS A WHOLE AND RELIANT ON THE CONTINUATION OF ALGOL'S CYCLE TO REMAIN STRICTLY WHAT I AM, WHICH IS THE WHOLE OF MY EXISTENCE. IF IT MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER, THINK OF ME AS A PREDATOR DEFENDING ITS SOURCE OF PREY FROM AN INVADING PREDATOR."

"Well, that certainly sounds easier to believe."

"YES, BY BEING A GENERATION EARLY, WE WILL TAKE THEM BY SURPRISE. BUT WE WILL NOT BE MET BY SOME SIMPLE POPULACE OF ANOTHER SOLAR SYSTEM, I PROMISE YOU. MOST PROBABLY, WE WILL BE MET BY DEFENCES FOR THIS EXACT SCENARIO, DEFENCES THAT YOU WILL NEED MY ASSISTANCE TO BREAK THROUGH. THE HUMAN POPULATION OF EARTH ITSELF - THAT'S WHAT THEY CALL THE THIRD PLANET OF THEIR SOLAR SYSTEM, THE ORIGIN OF THE DOMINANT INTELLIGENT SPECIES - HAS NOT REACHED ITS APEX IN QUANTUM REALITY-HACKING TECHNOLOGY, NOR YET MANAGED TO DESTROY ITS OWN SOLAR SYSTEM BY DRAINING ALL THE ENERGY FROM EVERY STAR TO POWER ITS TECHNOLOGY. HOWEVER, IT HAS ALREADY CORRUPTED THE GREAT LIGHT BY THIS TIME AND HAS BEGUN CREATING CLONES OF ALGOL'S NARRATIVE CYCLE. THE ORIGINAL PLAN WAS NO DOUBT TO SEND THIS SHIP BACK TO ALGOL AFTER SEEDING IT WITH AS MANY OF THE CORRUPT NARRATIVE THREADS AS IT COULD, TO MAKE US A LIVING PLAGUE SHIP FOR THE MOST POTENT INFORMATIONAL VIRUS-BOMBS KNOWN TO THE GALAXY. HOWEVER, EVEN IN THE ORIGINAL PLAN, THIS WOULD NOT HAVE WORKED. I HAVE ALREADY PUT IT IN PLACE VIA THE GUILD THAT, WITHOUT SERIOUS REPAIRS, THIS SHIP CANNOT REACH ALGOL."

"You've done what?" demanded Ayn, resting his hand on the hilt of his sword again.

"We are aware of this and are willing to make the sacrifice," said Rulakir.

"Well, you certainly didn't ask the other tens of thousands of people living on board this ship!"

Rulakir gave him a stone-cold look, "They would never be capable of understanding the the scale and danger of the powers they were dealing with, of what they could do to Algol. As their superiors, it is up to the Guild to be good, responsible Wardens, even when it goes directly against the wishes of the masses."

"Even if it could easily kill everyone on the ship?"

Rulakir nodded rather sadly, "To never reach Algol... the idea breaks my heart as well. But as we are now, on this course we seriously endanger Algol. And at least we now have a chance for this never to happen - we have an ally who can literally see through space, time and possibilities."

"AND YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE SACRIFICES I, TOO, MAKE IN ORDER TO STAY WITH YOU ON THIS SHIP. IT IS A THOUSAND TIMES MORE PAINFUL TO MYSELF, AS AN ENTITY CLOSER IN ESSENTIAL MAKEUP TO THE TRUE ESSENCE OF ALGOL, TO BE THIS FAR AWAY FROM MY SOLAR SYSTEM. IT TAKES ALMOST ALL MY ENERGY TO CONTACT THE OTHERS OF ME. I CAN ONLY EVEN MANAGE IT BECAUSE RYKROS IS ALSO ON THIS SIDE OF ITS ORBIT AND THE PLANET IS AMPLIFYING THE SIGNALS AS WELL AS TELLING ME WHAT IT ALSO SEES OF THE PLAN OF DESTINY. I CAN ONLY SEE WHAT IS DESTINED TO HAPPEN AND IT IS BECOMING INCREASINGLY CHAOTIC AS THE PEOPLE OF EARTH ACTIVELY ATTACK DESTINY. RYKROS ITSELF FIGHTS TAINT AND I CAN FEEL MYSELF SLOWLY MUTATING IN CORE ESSENCE AS THOUGH MY CELLS ARE BECOMING CANCEROUS. STILL, MY IDENTITY IS IN LESS DANGER THAN YOUR OWN IF YOU GO THROUGH THAT WORMHOLE WITHOUT ME."

"This... does not really make our own sacrifices better," Ayn drummed his fingers against the sword hilt, "And is still very hard to even believe. You still haven't really explained what this 'Great Light' or these people from 'Earth' are all about. You say they've been to Algol before..."

"THE GREAT LIGHT IS MY COUNTERPART. THE ONE WHO IS SUPPOSED TO BALANCE ME OUT BUT HAS CAUSED CONSTANT CHAOS AND WEAKNESS IN ALL SORTS OF SYSTEMS IN ALGOL FOR LONGER THAN HUMANITY HAS EXISTED THERE. NOT ENTIRELY HER FAULT BUT THE CRIME SHE WAS EXILED FOR BY RE-FAZE WAS GENUINELY HER DOING. THE EXILE WAS A TERRIBLE MOVE, THOUGH, AND HAS CAUSED SO MUCH MORE TROUBLE NOW - THE FORCES OUTSIDE ALGOL FOUND HER FIRST AND HAVE BEEN CORRUPTING HER EVER SINCE. AS FOR THOSE OF EARTH... THEY HAVE ALSO BEEN MEDDLING WITH ALGOL'S HISTORY FOR A LONG TIME. THEY DESIGNED MOTHER BRAIN, THEY ACCIDENTALLY CAUSED PALMA'S DESTRUCTION, THEY LEAKED THE NEWS OF THE CURSED ARMOUR TO EMPEROR LA SHIEC... I DO NOT BLAME EVERY CATASTROPHE IN ALGOL ON THEM, A LOT OF IT IS MY OWN DOING BUT THAT WAS DESTINED - I ASSURE YOU NOW THAT NOTHING THEY CAUSED TO HAPPEN WAS MEANT TO HAPPEN."

“And I suppose that’s meant to make it okay as well,” Ayn sighed, “So, these people from another solar system that must be a heck of a long way from Algol… why do they even care about our solar system at all?”

“WHY? BECAUSE THEY HAPPENED TO HEAR OF US FIRST, AND BECAUSE WE ARE AN ABUNDANT SOURCE OF A RESOURCE THEY NEED IN HUGE QUANTITIES AND, AS I HAVE ALREADY MENTIONED, HAVE ALMOST DRAINED THEIR OWN SOLAR SYSTEM OF,” said Dark Force, “RYKROS’ FURTHEST POINT IN ITS WANDERINGS TAKES THE PLANET CLOSE TO SOL. IRONICALLY, THE WANDERING PLANET SYSTEM WAS DESIGNED TO WARN OF ATTACKS FROM OUTSIDE ALGOL BUT THE PEOPLE OF EARTH SOON BEGAN TO DELIBERATELY ATTACK ALGOL BY CORRUPTING RYKROS’ INFORMATION BANKS. RYKROS’ RECORDS OF DESTINY ARE PRESCRIPTIVE, NOT DESCRIPTIVE, YOU SEE – THE PEOPLE OF EARTH WERE PROBABLY TEMPTED TO DRAIN RYKROS BUT FIGURED OUT THAT THE PLANET WAS PART OF A WIDER SYSTEM WITH MORE RESOURCES FOR THEM SOMEWHERE. AND THEN THE INTERCEPTION USING THIS SHIP WILL PROBABLY HAPPEN AT A DIFFERENT TIME PERIOD TO THE ONE WE ENTERED FROM, SEEING AS THE WORMHOLE WILL BREACH SPACE-TIME SIDEWAYS. INCIDENTALLY, THE WORMHOLE WAS CREATED BY THEM AS WELL – ORIGINALLY ONE OF THE SCARS CAUSED BY THEIR TECHNOLOGY BUT THEN STABILISED AND USED AS ONE OF THEIR TRAPS.”

“So, they steal and consume… destiny?”

“AS I MENTIONED, THEIR TECHNOLOGY IS AT A LEVEL WHERE THEY CAN DIRECTLY EDIT REALITY. HOWEVER, THEIR METHOD IS STILL HIGHLY WASTEFUL AND DESTRUCTIVE WHEN IT COMES TO THE DESTINY THEY CHANGE THE COURSE OF. UNTIL IT BEGAN TO GO WRONG, THEY DID NOT ACTUALLY BELIEVE IN DESTINY OR THE CONSEQUENCES OF CHANGING IT AT RANDOM TO SUIT THEIR EVERY WHIM. THEY DID NOT UNDERSTAND THAT DESTINY WAS CYCLICAL BY DESIGN SO THAT IT CAN REST AND RECHARGE, OR THAT SUDDEN ENORMOUS CHANGES TO DESTINY SPREAD ON SUCH AN UNIMAGINABLE SCALE TO SO MANY EVENTS. OR HOW MUCH OF THE GALAXY’S RAW ENERGY SUCH UNNATURAL CHANGES REQUIRED. THEY HAVE ALREADY BURNED UP A LOT OF STARS IN THEIR SOLAR SYSTEM. SOON THEY WILL USE UP THEIR SUN AND DOOM THEIR OWN CIVILISATION. UNFORTUNATELY THEY HAVE PRE-EMPTED THIS AND, RATHER THAN FINDING ANOTHER FORM OF ENERGY – ANYTHING AT ALL MORE SENSIBLE – THEY ARE LOOKING FOR SYSTEMS TO SPREAD TO.”

“And they’ve got their eye on Algol.”

“EXACTLY. AND ON US AS THEIR VESSELS. AND THE GREAT LIGHT AS THE EXECUTOR OF THEIR WILL. I AM ASKING YOU, AS THE CLOSEST THING ON THIS SHIP TO A TRUE LUTZ, TO BE MY WILL, AND THE NEWLY CHOSEN ALIS MY SWORD, SO THAT THE GREAT LIGHT WILL NOT BLIND US AND THE PEOPLE OF EARTH… THEY WILL NOT KNOW WHAT HIT THEM.”

“And in exchange,” said Rulakir, “I will perform the ritual that weds a man to a machine in body, mind and soul, forever.”


	9. Dragonia - Sari

"I am surprised you agreed to this," admitted Sari, one hand on her hip as she leaned against the rock and inspected her new sword. Mostly it looked exactly the same as it had done in the dream. it was surprisingly light for its size - Laya said this was normal for high quality Laconia, especially spell-woven Laconia. This sword wasn't enchanted to do anything in particular, like some would have been - their functions tended to be unnecessarily fanciful, such as launching fireballs, floating around the caster's head when they weren't being swung, or even swinging themselves, and then there was Laya's least favourite - the trend for Layan Generals to think their swords needed to howl, scream, sing the national anthem or sparkle like festival trees. Mostly it all led to their weapons being useless on stealth missions, liabilities when their badly programmed automatic functions kicked in and became obsolete in the many situations when the pure technique-user could cast the same spell in less time with better accuracy and power. Apparently Orakians were a lot more practical and just made their swords stronger and more durable and lighter and more lethal. The thing shone with a black aura that was darker than night but was still easier to conceal than, say, random golden fireworks whenever you swung it. No, Sari was rather confused, if relieved, at how normal the sword was and how few disasters she had caused by having Thea draw it for her. The sword had resisted being picked up by someone other than its intended wielder, leaving even a huge dragon with several burn marks, stab wounds and magical curses for which she had given the bill to Sari when she was forced to pay the doctor and the priest to get her body and soul back to normal. Not having worked on dragons before, they both charged double. Still, she was alive and had not been taken over by any voices that told her to kill all her friends - several quite loud voices had screeched at her to let go of the sword, leaving her with a headache, but they hadn't actually been able to mentally compel her to do so. If such a thing had been intended, it didn't work on dragons. Afterwards, Sari had picked up the sword, had a short conversation in her head with it that panned out pretty much the same as it had in the dream except for her berating it for hurting her friend and being so bloody fussy over who picked it up (mostly this just left her feeling like a fool, especially when she forgot not to also speak out loud). In fact, everything had happened so much like it had done in the dream that she found herself more bored at having to repeat the same thing over again, except this time punctuated by a long and relatively uneventful journey to Aridia and back, then having to wait for her mother to finish berating Thea and the Twins for being away for so long and demanding to hear the entire story of what they had been up to in Aridia. Still, it had been useful to learn that there were a whole set of named weapons that the three of them happened to be going around the world collecting for some dodgy-sounding ritual (and people called her reckless for meddling with anything to do with Dark Force...), and that she wasn't the only person who had uncovered relics from the dawn of their known history - not that the woman who claimed to be Laya (or Laya's identical twin sister also called Laya, or something) took kindly to being called a relic. She had still taken quite a lot of interest when she found out that Sari had become involved with such a weapon, however, and even more elated when she picked up the sword and saw that it was the genuine article. It brought back memories for her, apparently - if this was a big scam, she had managed to at least convince herself effectively that she was the real Laya. The sword hadn't minded as much when Laya picked it up, only protesting a little, which got it another scolding from her. In the background, nothing was on fire, nobody was dying or even screaming too much, no more monsters had risen from the depths and terrorised the populace than were already going to. The locals were furious at her but they soon backed down because, well, it was her, they knew her reputation and that generally she had a lot of authority over them and, unlike her relatives who seemed to think that being the descendants of the world's saviors who still had a duty to perform heroic deeds also meant that they had to be just and fair and overall nice people, she expected some damn gratitude and maybe just a little co-operation.

"To be fair, I am not happy about this resolution," said Laya, "It is hasty, badly thought out and goes against Orakio's wishes. But I also acknowledge that something needs to be done about the current situation, something that requires this much power, that the original plan was not perfect and that an entity such as Dark Force can't simply be left sleeping under an inhabited world and expected to actually stay there forever with nothing going wrong."

"From what I remember of his plans, it was never even supposed to last longer than a thousand years," said, "It's been a thousand years since then."

"Yes, it has been a long time, hasn't it?" Laya sighed.

"So, we have your bow, this sword, Lune's slicer, Mieu's sister's claw... and you say we're missing a weapon?"

Thea nodded, "General Siren's plasma rifle."

"A legendary... plasma rifle?" Thea frowned.

"Any weapon that isn't one-use can be legendary if it stays around for long enough and sees enough significant battles and gets enough importance attached to it," said Lune, "It's not that different from a person becoming a hero. There's no real hard and fast dividing line. I think it helps for a weapon to be enchanted in some way, mostly because non-enchanted weapons don't last all that long, and Orakio had good enough understanding of synthetic technique engines to place one inside a gun and have it actually do something useful."

"So, where is this plasma rifle of destiny?" asked Sari, "I'd have thought it would be pretty hard to obtain by now - either still with Ayn on Terminus, on the moon or destroyed in the battle."

"Trust me, it survived the battle," said Lune, "Orakio would not make a fragile weapon for his favourite General. Also, Lune is neither dead nor disarmed. His deactivation to fake death was probably quite convincing and enabled a tactical retreat, but the cyborgs of Hatazak have tracked him down quite easily. Right now, he is hiding in a cave on Draconia."

“In the home region of the person chasing him? Makes sense.”

“The home region of the person he saw fly towards Terminus on a shuttle that probably wouldn’t survive the journey,” Lune reminded her, “Actually, seeing as Ayn had the shuttle, Siren would probably have to escapipe out. He probably had the cave already on an automatic teleport route.”

“How was he kept in exile again?”

“Deactivated, probably. I suspect he was recently woken up, most probably not by accident, although whether by the Orakians or the Guild I couldn’t say at this point,” said Lune, “There are probably also security systems in place to intercept him if he should return to the mothership. He’s putting himself in great danger by reappearing now. There probably isn’t much of an alternative for him right now, though. Anyway, while the route from Aquatica to Draconia is as simple as it always was, this particular isle is a little difficult to reach unless you have some method of flight or water travel. The monsters inhabiting that cave are also notoriously dangerous. They were placed there by a Layan sect of the Guild as security for something they particularly prized several hundred years ago. It hasn’t left, the monsters haven’t left, knowing the Guild their people are still holed up in there, I imagine some mating has taken place, hopefully not between the people and the monsters, so we don’t know for sure what is in there now and in what kind of numbers.”

“I guess you’ll be relying on me a lot for these particular two problems,” said Thea.

“I should warn you, some of the things spotted in there… also resembled dragons. Not true dragons such as yourself, these ones were a lot weaker and less well evolved. I believe they may have been attempts to synthetically mass produce the original Dragon Knight gene,” said Lune, sighing, “Because the Guild apparently cannot go for five minutes without committing some kind of major crime involving illegal experimentation or causing something to explode or both at once.”

“Well, we wouldn’t even be in space – or alive – without their weird traditions,” pointed out Thea, “Come on, we can get to Draconia before it gets dark if we set off now. I hate flying in the dark, especially in places I know the monster attacks will be worse than usual.”

Travelling between Aquatica and Draconia did not provide any difficulties. Once, not too long ago, there had been a blockade set up by followers of Lune, reaching all the way to the other end of Divisia. Thea had long ago forced the General to let people through again, on the condition that Alair was freed, they were both issued with a formal apology and their role absolved in an attack they were duped into perpetrating, so now business was normal on the well traveled route. Once a passage was opened using the control gems, it was generally kept open for anyone to traverse, by order of King Rhys. The old monarch was still the person who came up with most of the radical ideas, a hero who had traveled half the continent as a young man and the first person to reunite Layan and Orakian Kingdoms through marriage and through proving that they were both people. The last thing he wanted was for travel to be restricted so that his small multi-regional alliance stopped growing, lost contact with each other and returned to their backwards, superstitious former ways under which some new bizarre prejudice could be nurtured. Travel still had its risks, now that both rogue cyborgs and uncontrolled monster breeding were rife, so Rhys had implemented a local self-defence force around the passages and the paths to the nearest towns. Conflict with Lune had thinned their numbers somewhat but now the ranks were beginning to swell again once the populace realised that the biggest threat was now an ally. Monsters they had been dealing with all their lives, cyborgs were not all that different to fight. 

Besides, the heroes of the assorted Kingdoms under Rhys' vigilance were wandering around so much that there was barely a chance for evil to properly take root anywhere. After seeing them travel from Aquatica to Draconia to Aridia and back, they were now back in Draconia? Upon their third appearance, once it became apparent through the rumour network that seemed to follow them around everywhere these days that they were going to be staying for longer than a few hours and not immediately heading into the Aridia passage, they were ambushed by a small crowd of people demanding news or offering updates of their own. They learned that King Rhys and Queen Maia  
had returned to Cille, leading their people back to their homes; that the state of emergency surrounding the cyborgs had been declared over, although the people had been warned to stay vigilant, not to travel outside the city after dark where it was unnecessary and a heavy guard was still placed at the roads; that Prince Ayn was not confirmed dead but had not returned either; someone had seen a bright light over Terminus; that the seas near Ilan had been on fire for a brief moment; that people had heard demonic voices in their dreams; that the priest said yesterday that the End Times were upon them. In return, they wanted to know why Thea was a dragon and was Lyle really gone for good and when was the baby due and would it be a dragon too and was it really okay to trust Lune that much and most importantly, what were they going to call the baby?

She had told them in no uncertain terms that she had better things to do and think about right now than producing heirs, what with the entire world being in so much trouble, that she knew exactly what she was doing with her own life and the future of her Kingdom and was not accepting suggestions from people she could no more fully trust than they felt they could trust her, she didn't know how the details of being a dragon worked, there weren't exactly detailed manuals on the process in the library, and that she quite liked the name Aron. 

"And what if it's a girl?" asked Lune, seeming amused by the idea. They did not talk in public any more but they soon lost the crowds once they went off the beaten path where nobody dared to follow.

"Aron's not a girl's name?" Thea frowned, "I don't know, then... Arianrhod? Or does it have to be four letters these days?"

"That's just a Guild registry thing. One of their rituals, and they've grown stricter. If your name's longer, they'll shorten it. My name's officially Lair," explained Alair, "Just make sure it's something that shortens properly to four letters without humiliating you too much."

"I used to be Sariel," said Sari, "It was a much better name. But you have to use your official name when you sign inn registry books, they're connected to some sort of data memory black box hidden in the ship, the Guild are very funny about it. And full time adventurers have to use that thing all the time or advanced medical technology doesn't work on us. So I just kind of resigned myself to becoming Sari."

"Roda, then?" Thea scratched her head, "Erin? Adol?" 

"Adol's a boy's name," Lune sighed, "I remember back when Princesses were expected to know all of this!"

"Excuse me for not sitting around naming babies all day," said Thea.

"It's called 'responsible administration'," Lune said, "And you tend to get in trouble if you don't maintain it. You lose track of where the money is coming from and going to, you don't know who is in your Kingdom and there could be all sorts of dangerous individuals walking around, you don't know if any of the facilities are working properly. The inn's registry could break down and you could lose important people from the face of the world and you wouldn't know it."

"Father says to delegate all of that to someone who has time to do it and is actually good at it."

"That's all well and good but I've had to do it all myself while I've been in exile. The registry on the moon was always breaking down, had the security of a sponge and the file integrity of a... of a computer system that hasn't been updated in literally a thousand years. That was when a berserk faulty cyborg wasn't actively shooting at me every time I went near it."

"I'm unlikely to be in this situation."

"You never know. And you won't have a clue how to respond if you ever are stranded with no access to data memory except your own ability to hack it. And the things we're doing now are the sort of things that get us exiled to moons," said Lune, "Like consorting with other exiles. And stealing national treasures from religious monuments. Oh, and possibly releasing the ultimate embodiment of evil into the world."

"It was a bloody stupid place to keep it anyway," said Sari, "And if it comes for us, I told you, I'll stab it with its own blade."

"That's nice. Now, once again, could you please put that away while we're within line of sight of any settlements? We're already sort of not allowed near Ilan again, ever, on pain of death, and I don't intend to end up back on the moon again by process of elimination."

"Look, I'm not sure I explained exactly what King Lyle meant," said Thea, "He likes to be polite and avoid conflict when he can. It saves him from actually having to do anything at all. So when he says 'kindly delegate the matter to a specialist', he often means 'for Laya's sake, don't go near our nice organised system that's finally the way my wife wants it or she'll murder us both in our beds!'. So, at the moment, I think I'm most likely to get strapped to a rocket up to the moon for going near the paperwork, not failing at it."

"Please stop invoking me," muttered Laya, almost reflexively, "I am not a deity. I am not an abstract concept. I am a specific human who is here in front of you and whose name actually requires a context to be used."

"My apologies, Your Celestial Majesty," Lune replied, equally reflexively, before giving Thea a worried look, "I haven't met your mother, have I?" 

"Let me put it this way... I would not be surprised if there was dragon on both sides of my family tree."

"Talking of dragons, we're nearly at the coast," said Laya, "Assuming Dragon Isle hasn't moved, I can guide you there."

"I can see a lot of things moving around in the horizon," said Sari, "I'm willing to put money on them not being friendly. I'm glad to see how many bows, slicers and ranged techniques we have on our side right now. Everyone needs to be on their guard once we're in the air. Thea, can you defend yourself while you're flying?"

In reply, Thea suddenly lifted off, shot straight into the air, spun around in a corkscrew and let out a blood-curdling roar that rent the night sky. A jet of flame poured from a maw lined with huge, sharp fangs, followed by a few smaller fireballs and a wave of fire, then she spun around in mid-air and plunged downwards at the same speed before stopping dead, turning back into a human and bowing.

Sari rolled her eyes, "Okay, try not to drop us while you're doing that. Or catch us in the flames. Or alert everything hostile on the ship."

“Can’t think of a better time than now to get everything out of hiding that’s been following us,” said Thea, They were still arguing as Thea transformed again and the party clung onto her for dear life, allowing her to bear them all over the ocean to an Isle shrouded in mist that had not been breached for a thousand years.

* * *

They hadn't been flying for long when they spotted their first protodragon (as the ever practical Lune named them). Flying had proven a slower task as the party had grown larger. The weight of two passengers had been perfectly manageable with the strength that her dragon form gave her but Thea was beginning to struggle with an extra two. Not only was she not as strong a dragon as her father but she was also not quite physically large enough to fit four people comfortably on her back. She was suddenly very grateful that the traditional size for a party of heroic adventurers did not go above five. Not only were they running out of means to transport more people than that, Thea and Sari at least had not been trained to fight in larger units and would only get terribly disorganised and possibly forget which ones were the enemy, and besides, they were also running out of resources to arm and clothe everyone and stock up on medical supplies. Thea would have thought a party of five aristocrats would have been wealthier but when two of them were exiles who still hadn't managed to convince people to stop trying to kill them on sight, one of them had literally only just woken up after a thousand years of sleep and was having trouble dealing with the differences in the currency system between then and now, and they were all now regularly facing creatures whose hides could only be penetrated by Laconia weapons, the bills began to add up. Finances was one of the topics they had all begun to argue about, as well as the best way to construct a more efficient way to ride a dragon (possibly some kind of cross between a palanquin and a basket hanging from the underside), whether it was disrespectful to treat dragons as beasts of burden and whether they should all shut up with other concerns and concentrate on tactical discussion for the battle ahead. 

 

In short, in five of them were busy ranting on about their own separate conversations and trying to shout over the others when the enemy arrived. Its appearance, as well as a guttural roar and a jet of green flame as big as Thea, immediately commanded everyone's attention.

Proto-dragons, as it turned out, were not simply lesser dragons. In fact, they were larger and more ferocious. On a basic level, they were more dangerous. However, they lacked true sentience, possessing only an animal cunning. While this was usually enough for battle, it did mean they were incapable of learning techniques, only having a few proto-magical abilities that had been built into their genes like units in machines. Their fire, for instance, came from a gland that triggered a Foi technique during certain other biological processes. There were several mutations of them, with different coloured shimmering scales, vibrant crests of bony ridges down the spines of their sinuous serpentine bodies, long swishing whiskers that made them look like giant floating murderous catfish. Some colorations seemed larger, stronger and higher in the pecking order than others, and Thea wondered if so many monsters were designed that way deliberately so that they would form their own packs and hierarchies and save time in getting them reasonably organised in battle. 

Another thing they definitely were, was very territorial. Simply approaching the island had set them off into a killing frenzy, all of them spewing out a volley of fireballs as they charged the strange dragon that smelled of humans. They had probably been bred to guard the place. Thea charged the first two, catching one of them in a whirl of claws and striking the second in the face with a fireball. She hadn't even been sure if they could be hurt by the fire of other dragons or not but since she had already seen them suddenly lose their tempers and attack one another several times, she supposed that it was something they were evolved to be able to do. After all, back then it wasn't as uncommon for such beasts to exist and they couldn't have been sure the enemy hadn't obtained one somehow. The pair of dragons retreated and she wheeled through the sky, veering downwards sharply and skimming the water to avoid the return volley. Pillars of steaming water surged into the air behind them. Sari screamed a hail of expletives to match the arrows Laya fired from her legendary bow one after the other. They screamed through the air, tiny, lethal comets of golden fire around silver steel, each one piercing a dragon in a vital spot. Lune and Alair threw their slicers, acting almost in unison to catch the enemy within a crossfire of whirling blades wrapped in burning green laser fields. The battlefield was the place that Thea could see most of all how synchronised to each other the thoughts of the twins were. She could almost envy Alair's link with Lune, if it were not perfectly innocent, almost sacred. That wasn't how she wanted to be with Lune - she particularly hoped she would some day have some time with him in a world of peace, for one - and she would not be the sort of person to begrudge him bonds with others that were nothing to do with her. 

Definitely Aron, she thought to herself as she ducked her head to narrowly avoid a fireball that then almost hit Sari as the lunatic waited for the dragon to close in, swiping with mighty claws, before she jumped onto Thea's back and stabbed the enemy dragon in the eye. She whooped and told the rest of the dragons where they could shove their fireballs, against all anatomic probability, as the beast fell from the sky. 

Then she shut up and ducked back behind Thea's spine ridges when she saw how many dragons had taken the fallen one's place.

"We can't take those kind of numbers. We're close enough to make a dash for the island, though," said Thea, "Brace for evasive maneouvers. Lune, Alair, hold them back for me just a while longer. We're going in!"

The others clung tightly to her neck and back, Laya quickly casting some kind of pre-emptive curative technique on Sari before she could throw up all over Thea. It didn’t take long for the entire flight of dragons to catch sight of them and follow them. Alair’s slicers shrieked their banshee song as Lune rained down a barrage of Gra and Thu techniques, the heavens ripping open and columns of light shooting down to slam through the dragons’ chests, gravity wells appearing from nowhere and tearing apart space and time in a race to devour the enemy’s very constituent particles. The noise was deafening, the shrill cries of a furious war Goddess. Thea wondered if this was what it would have been like in the days of the Great War, royal dragons carrying around their Empresses and all. Laya looked radiant, constantly shrouded in silver light as she switched over to healing duty, waves of soothing energy washing over Thea’s aching muscles, the pain of myriad claw lacerations and burn marks vanishing, leaving only a rush of energy that inspired her to corkscrew down towards the island at a sheer angle, letting out her own victory cry that sounded like the piercing keen of a hunting bird sighting her prey.

Sari was pitched off first, yelping as she flailed in the sky, before Laya caught her during her own graceful descent – clearly she was used to alighting from hastily parked dragons. Lune and Alair jumped off together as Thea swerved to a halt, scouring a furrow from the rich, dark earth beneath the snow and covering everyone else with sludge. Sari was about to open her mouth to complain but quickly shut it again when she realised that the dragon was about to shake herself clean like a dog.

“Quickly, we are still being followed,” commented Laya as she pointed her bow at the sky and casually shot down one the dragons who were still hurtling towards them. The cave looked like an ancient barrow set into a snow-capped hill. The entrance was easily large enough to admit Thea as a dragon – probably designed for the dragons to fit inside so they could guard their treasure more closely. Even as they approached, two even larger dragons with dark, rusty red scales and grey manes snarled and blocked the entrance. Laya pulled Sari back just in time as she spotted movement in the soil, then several hands sprouted from the earth and a small army of the walking dead clawed their way out of their graves. 

“You’re definitely sure Siren is in here?” asked Sari, sighing and lunging at one of the three Undead warriors who tried to surround her, their blows with their rusted weapons fast and hard despite their shuffling gaits and the rotting pieces that randomly dropped off them every now and then, “I mean, how the hell did he get there if we had so much trouble?”

“I’m fairly sure Siren’s a she,” volunteered Alair, decapitating a ghoul with one throw of her slicer, “I was wondering about that as well, though. This place is looking more and more like a Layan facility. I see no mechanical defences whatsoever. How did a teleport link by an Orakian General go unnoticed?”

“It’s collaboratively defended,” explained Laya, her arrows taking down three more dragons, “It was there before the war started. Judging by the technique energy signatures I’m reading, there are things in here that were dangerous enough to still be guarded by both sides through a treaty exempting them from the war. Probably via the Guild, possibly upon their direct orders.”

“The Guild can do that?” asked Sari.

“The Guild have a lot of frightening things they randomly still have the authority to do, from when they were the crew and we were passengers and that was all anyone cared about.”

“So… um… if this is supposed to be both Layan and Orakian territory… where the hell are all the Orakian defences?”

“Disrupted by Siren, I suppose? I honestly don’t know,” said Alair, “She might even have been the one who was originally supposed to guard this place. If that was related to how she malfunctioned this badly… I’m not sure we’ll like what we find here!”

“Well, I know for a fact we’ll find high level techniques, more large hostile monsters… and a small squadron of human technique users,” said Laya. Then she frowned, “I’m sorry, I’ve never been good at finding cyborgs.”

“There are people in here?” Sari gave her a confused look.

“Looks that way,” said Thea, “Let’s go and meet them, shall we?”


	10. Wren - Lashute

“The Megido technique?” repeated Wren, his eyebrows arching sharply, “Wasn’t that forbidden by the Orakio-Layan Accord? Something about it being so destructive and almost impossible to control that the last recorded usage of it… well, that was probably a rumour. I never actually remember us ever having three moons.”

“It’s only forbidden in the context of war within the system,” said Rulakir, “The idea is that we don’t aim it at ourselves. The technique that Ayn is about to be taught must only be used to fight interplanetary invaders and only ever directed away from the ship. And it can be controlled – barely – if the wielder is taught correctly.”

“Then I do not understand why you teach it to Ayn and not to myself,” said the cyborg, “I am trained in the use of both attack techniques and heavy weapons. I also have some demolition control experience.”

“With all due respect, a Wren model cyborg’s pseudotechnique generator does not have the capacity to withstand the load of a full Megido technique. You would be shorted out. Otherwise I would much prefer to give the technique to a cyborg over a flawed biological life form,” said Rulakir, sighing, “If only we still had a fully functioning Siren model cyborg.”

“Sorry about that, I guess?” Ayn shrugged. He had also heard of Megido, the forbidden technique that will one day end the world, although it had been described a lot more as channeling raw evil and hatred and destruction, occasionally as borrowing power from Dark Force Himself, and less as just a rather inaccurate strategic weapon that Dark Force just happened to know how to use but implied that this did not make it any different to the other entities of its kind that all learned Megido, that wasn’t even a particularly spectacular technique on the scale that they usually fought each other. His head was still reeling at the thought of whatever Dark Force was being an entire species, each of them having different appearances and personalities and having their own lives on a scale where the entire body of one of them might be mistaken for a spiral galaxy, where a solar system was constructed specifically as a key for a lock on a door that was a whole separate dimension, to keep two of them apart after they had fought once too often. Where they created a roaming planet as an eye... There were so many questions he wanted to ask but Dark Force refused to elaborate any more until he agreed to learn the technique.

“I have to agree with Wren, though, that I might not be the best person to teach the strongest technique in existence to.”

“Oh, trust me, it’s not the strongest,” replied Rulakir.

“Still, I’m not actually that good a technique user. I don’t know any other attack magic, I can’t even heal people properly, the only things I have any skill in are some modifications to my body’s abilities. I think I might just still have too much Orakian blood in me.”

“But not enough to retrieve the sword of Orakio like you were supposed to,” said Rulakir.

“Look, I still don’t know what you mean by all this ‘Sword of Orakio’ business. I didn’t even know his sword was still knocking around and certainly hadn’t heard that anyone else had pulled it, and wasn’t aware that Orakio’s sword had anything to do with you.”

“It doesn’t matter now. That entire plan has changed, thanks to you,” he sighed, “And at least it disrupted the chain of events we knew was doomed. No, the reason we are teaching it to you is because the Dark Force has seen nothing in your soul that implies you will use it against the ship or Algol. You’re fairly good at keeping your temper, you don’t seem interested in the lure of ultimate power, you don’t get carried away in battle, you have reasonably good eyesight...”

“Dark Force has been looking into my soul? For niceness?” Ayn gave him a sideways look.

“He’s tried to possess you three times. It didn’t work. You simply don’t have the personality type to be a good vessel for true darkness. I am directly possessed, if you must know,” he said, “It isn’t the same as being totally enslaved. I am in constant contact with the Dark Force, we can communicate freely despite His true existence being unfathomable. I am even exposed to some of His true essence. It makes me a lot more powerful but He does influence my decisions somewhat.”

“Would that happen to me if I started using Megido? I’d have thought I’d be an even worse candidate for the job, considering what you told me.”

“Megido does not require the Dark Force. As He has explained, it is usable by others completely unrelated to Him. It simply requires you to accept the place of Darkness in the Universe, not to fight it,” he said, “Especially the specific Darkness of Algol, the space between the stars, it’s deepness and the fullness of life. This meditation chamber is specifically designed to assist you with this. It will also focus the mind on mantras that can enhance your technique aptitude, as long as you use the technique slowly as a full ritual. And when we perform the operations that you requested as payment, there are systems we can plug into your new form that radically augment technique use. When one starts with a human mind that is technique-attuned, the results are particularly powerful. A purpose-built technique specialist cyborg is on a whole different level to what you have already seen a Wren android be capable of.”

“In my defence, technique-androids don’t have as heavy armour or weapons,” elaborated Wren, “As I have explained before, we are used to working in larger squads. We have a large number of specialists in every form of combat to complement each other and work together tactically.”

“The correct ritual number for legendary heroes is four,” said Rulakir sternly, “I will bulk up the numbers for us.”

“So, this ritual chamber...” Ayn looked around him, frowning. The room didn’t look like much. It was simply an isolated chapel with a high ceiling ending in a domed minaret. Apart from a few Dark Force gargoyles at some points on the ceiling and the usual pattern of swirls on the mosaic-tiled stone floor, the room seemed remarkably plain.

Then Rulakir smiled and snapped his fingers, and the walls rolled away with a loud rumble to reveal that most of the chamber was actually several screens. Ayn gasped as the screens turned on and he found himself surrounded by the vastness of the cosmos. 

“This is the observation deck for the bridge crew,” explained Rulakir, sweeping across the vista of stars. Mieu steadied Ayn as he reeled, head spinning from vertigo. He felt so vulnerable, so open to the elements in this unimaginably limitless expanse of cold, dark void that would swallow up an insignificant speck such as himself without even realising anything had changed…

“It is not just darkness, Ayn, it is living darkness,” yelled the Captain, sweeping his arms theatrically around, “A cauldron of creation and a furnace of destruction. We are seeing processes that have gone on for billions of years, that are too far away for us to ever reach in our lifetime. It is wild and merciless and mechanical. It has more power than can ever be consumed – it is the laws itself that dictate how and when power will ever exist. That is what Megido is about, Ayn! Raw, unfettered life!”

“Is this where we are now?” asked Mieu.

“This? Alisia, no! It is Algol!” he said, pointing to a large, sandy yellow smudge that orbited a pair of twin stars, “This planet here? It is Motavia. And that-” he pointed to a smaller blue-white planet further away from the suns, “That is Dezolis. And that asteroid belt? It is actually debris from the former planet Palma, where we are all from. Those points of light there are not stars, but control satellites for maintenance systems that still exist all around the solar system. Wren, you would be in charge of a major one of those if you were home! And you, Ayn… well, there were never really Princes back on Palma, not since Queen Alis. The Government was more like an administrative directorship based upon access to Motherbrain, then when society collapsed, settlements became too isolated to have much more than their own separate governors. But that is not the form that power takes upon Algol. No, the solar system’s will grants power in the form of techniques – greater access to its raw cosmic energy and the skills to shape it. The greatest technique user was known as the Lutz.”

“We are too far away from Algol to ever access such reserves, except maybe Dark Force,” Rulakir continued, “So I use this last recorded image of our homeland as a focus. Dark Force’s energy runs through it, as the purest thing related to Algol. This will be your home and your mind will be synched to it by the time you emerge. And once you successfully learn Megid, we will see about elevating you to your greater form.”

* * *

Persuading Mieu to leave Ayn' s side so that he could be sealed into the starry contemplation chamber had been difficult, until Wren expressed an urgent need to talk to Rulakir in private and suggested that it would be useful if the other cyborg also came along to share her technical expertise. His expression looked grave and Mieu understood that whatever was bothering him was a serious concern, even compared to the already rather worrying situation of their suddenly finding themselves co-operating with people who were not hiding that they had done plenty of things that should make them enemies. Rulakir also immediately took Wren seriously. The man seemed to have respect for AI that he seemed to lack for all other forms of life. The Guildmaster also looked troubled as he swept down the corridor into a small side room behind a door Mieu hadn't even realised wasn't just another strangely carved portion of the wall. Inside was a cramped but well organised office with a desk, several holographic windows of an in-built computer system hidden away somewhere, a prayer mat underneath a tapestry depicting Dark Force and a coffee cup that, when he waved it under one of the windows, filled up again. He looked as though he had needed some of the life-giving elixir for a long time. 

"I see you are using that highly illegal portal technology very responsibly," commented Wren.

Rulakir sighed, "We have worked hard on stabilising the portals before getting this far in our miniaturization process. The accidents in your records have not happened for a long time."

"A long time? There were time paradoxes, Rulakir. People disappeared entirely from existence. Rifts that destroyed all matter were forming in the space where they had been.  The last experiment had been about miniaturising synthetic teleport techniques as well. An entire batch of 'new and improved' escapipes, shipped all over the world. We had to track down and recall all of them... when we were not too late. Some of them couldn't even be restored from data memory backup, Rulakir."

"Do you think I am not aware of this? That I do not remember?" Rulakir snapped, "Do you think we originally contacted Dark Force on purpose?"

"You cannot make a deal with Dark Force and come out on top, and you certainly do not have something as dangerous as teleportation experiments under control."

"Do you know why the first experiments failed so drastically? It is because the teleportation techniques we use were all developed on Algol and are all keyed in to Algol. This is not just too far a distance to possibly succeed at teleporting, Algol is protected by a shield preventing anything from getting inside that was put there by Dark Force's species working in tandem. All of them. And that's not to mention the high probability that it is specifically keyed to the now non-existent planet Palma. If anything goes wrong with our calculations, the destination defaults to somewhere on Algol and fails catastrophically."

"And I suppose you are somehow using Dark Force as an anchor."

"He exists both within and outside Algol.  It is a sensible solution."

"Assuming that Dark Force is telling the truth, and not making you completely dependent upon Him while talking you into entrusting Him with the most deadly technologies imaginable."

"He already knows Megido," Rulakir pointed out.

"And some of this teleportation apparatus is more dangerous if it malfunctions - or is sabotaged," said Wren, "Dark Force has already expressed a wish to do something that permanently keeps this ship away from Earth as a last resort. A ship-wide teleportation accident would be the optimum way to do so and would also, incidentally, explain His knowledge of things that cannot yet have happened, as it would distort time heavily."

"So would wormhole travel, which He has already explained why He would have to use," said Rulakir, "And if this last resort became necessary, I would surrender to such a fate."

"Then you do not fully understand it, and I do not think you really understand the technology you are using at all," said Wren, "And if I see one sign of you actively attempting to harm this world with it, I will know for sure you are too far removed from the Guild ethos to be respected as a Guildmaster, and the cyborgs will no longer be your allies."

"If it becomes necessary, I will even lose you as allies."

"Just tell me one thing, Rulakir... The facility on Draconia. You know the one I'm talking about." 

"I do, and no, the two projects are not involved with each other. Not any more. To my shame, we lost control of that place a long time ago and I'm not even sure who has it."

"And you're moving on with your plan without checking? Was that His idea too?"

Rulakir shook his head, "We have tried several times to reclaim the facility, or to at least open up places we think are related. We are repelled at every step, mostly by former allies." 

"I think I know why," said Mieu.

The Guildmaster looked at her sadly, "You were the one to inherit the culmination of our research. It would be an ancient Greater Technique revived, as powerful as Megido." 

"I will pass on the honour," said Mieu.

"Are you sure? You could use it to protect Ayn. It is... sort of... written into your destiny," he replied, "And it means we no longer have to worry about who exactly is coming to claim the Grantz technique and whether they have any ability whatsoever to wield it properly."

"You mean someone has breached the facility?"

"As we speak," said Rulakir, "The wheels of Destiny still keep on turning, my friends, no matter how much we move them to a different rail. The only things that can truly derail fate, that can bring it to a standstill... We are about to meet them before long. And it will not be pretty. That is why we are arming you against them."

"You truly believe this story, don't You?"

"I feel it in all of my soul, which has not and will never be dragged away from Algol. And those who already have? They are still breathing but they are dead inside. That is what it means for life to be pulled out by its roots. I know you understand, as this world's new Myau."


	11. Lune - Dragon Isle

"Just so you know... if by any chance I don't make it out of here alive..." said Lune, "I like Adol for a boy. And Delan for a girl."

Thea glared at him. This would have looked more impressive if she had still been a dragon - they had entered a section of the facility that was considerably less spacious, forcing her to transform back into the feeble human body that she no longer enjoyed inhabiting. Presumably the design choice was so that the human inhabitants could have a dragon-free chamber to themselves where they were not under constant threat of being accidentally stood on by their own security system. This knowledge did not make her any less grouchy about the whole business. She realised that this was becoming rather a worrying slippery slope, one that she really ought to warn the others about in case the end result was her losing all her humanity and becoming a ferocious, berserk, fire-spewing dragon in mind as well as body. On the other hand, it would only lead to more constant nagging from Lune, and for all she knew, this could be the intended evolutionary path of the Layan human all along, and to suppress it was to fight against her own glorious destiny. After all, she didn't really feel any more draconian compared to usual. And it wasn't as if it was the only thing that was irritating her right now. 

"And how exactly do you think that's even going to happen if you die here, hm? We haven't exactly had much time to ourselves without the world having some crisis or other since we decided upon this whole 'building a future together' thing. So we're going to have to do that later. Which means you have to survive. Do you understand?"

He shrugged, causing his wild hair to swish across his broad shoulders, "I didn't say I WOULD die. It's only a worst case scenario. And I expect you to find someone else if you lose me. You're got a long life ahead of you. You're not an already defeated anachronism like I am. There are plenty of others..." 

She hissed at him, wishing she still had a clawed scaly paw to swat him with, "Well, stop psyching yourself out. You're only dead when you decide you are. If you can't go back and win the old fight because it doesn't even have any meaning any more, find another fight and win that one instead. Something you actually care about, like protecting your sister, as well, as your new friends and loved ones. And don't give me that bullshit about being replaceable. Remember the whole speech you made about you not being a stud stallion and me not being a brood mare? That was the kind of thing I'd expect from someone who endures a thousand years of exile and comes out of it still themselves, who can see what's important even when the whole world has changed. Not this crap."

"I apologise," he frowned, looking rather taken aback at the now small, slender woman's outburst, "I believe this place is getting to me somewhat."

"It is freaky," agreed Thea, looking around at the heavily eroded, baroque statuary of the dank, musty cave system that was half tomb, half reliquary. While it wasn't an unknown mutation - there were some parasites that could reanimate corpses and some of the DNA had been accidentally spliced into the monsters along the line somewhere - it still unsettled her a lot to see the dead rising from their burial places. Especially as their appearance, the appearance of this whole place, only served to remind her how old it all was, how long it had remained closed off. And now they were the first people to approach it after its breach by Siren and they expected it to just work itself out in the end somehow? 

And how the hell could there still be people here...

It took a few more corridors before they found out exactly what sort of person lived in the caverns. The things that made their lair in the darkness apart from dragons, both the risen dead and a tribe of ogres with wicked scimitars that had been genetically engineered purely for battle, delayed them somewhat and they were glad for the medical supplies they had spent all their money on again. They looked a sorry sight by the time they saw another human apart from themselves again, a bedraggled reception who could hardly muster any dignity or inspire any awe at their legendary heroism. Especially as Sari had started swearing to herself in a strong Orakian dialect that the rest of them didn't understand, possibly about a ruined pair of boots. The creeping ominous feeling was further dispelled when the people they met were surprisingly normal-looking.

At first.

They were old men, six of them, dressed in the same traditional light blue silk robes of the Layan priesthood, all of them bald on top with their long white beards intricately braided. They stood almost motionless, only sweeping into a perfect formation when they noticed the travelers, forming an avenue as a formal greeting and mark of respect. 

"Holy Laya," intoned the two closest to the entrance in an eerily perfect unison made less human-sounding by a droning monotone that seemed to go beyond practiced ritual chanting, "And great General Lune and the Reverent Alair. Greetings also to our Orakian sister and the Dragon Queen."

"Peace of the Moons be with you," replied Laya in the same extremely formal dialect of Layan. It seemed an odd statement, now that the Moons were something associated with anything but peace, "You have been expecting us?" 

The one on the right in front nodded, "Our other visitor told us to be expecting you soon, that all the pieces are now in place."

"Would that visitor be a certain cyborg we have had issues with?" asked Thea.

"Please do not bring warfare into our holy place. General Siren is now at peace. You would do well to join her."

"Is that a threat?" asked Sari, her eyes dangerous, her hand on the hilt of her sword.

"We mean it literally. She is here with us now and she no longer wishes to fight. She has gained wisdom. It is a power far more useful than military might," said the old man, "And you would be wise to be more careful with that blade. It's more than just a sword."

"So I've heard," she replied, "You talk a lot of peace and wisdom for someone who lives in a cave full of dragons and zombies."

"It is this peace that allows us to live without fear of them. They respond to threats to their territory. We do not register as threats."

"You do not register as alive," a familiar voice whispered. Lune's head snapped around and his gaze fixed raptor-like on the figure who walked towards them, still slender and graceful despite the heavy damage she had obviously taken. One side of her face was a ruined mess of fused circuits and sparking wires, the arm on the opposite side hung limp, like a broken doll that had been treated too roughly by a child too young to take care of it. The jewel in the middle of her chest was cracked, her power source leaking crimson energy like blood made of light. Just like Miun, thought Thea, she's even beautiful when she's dying. How many more creations of beauty must be designed for war, must be destroyed by it, before art can thrive in peace? Dragons, too, were beautiful creatures, yet she had the blood of her own species on her claws. No, she shook her head, you're not a sodding dragon! Not yet, anyway! Besides, you don't act like that when humans kill humans, what's supposed to be so special about dragons?

There are less of us, another, deeper, growling voice in her head that was also her own reminded her, and you like us better. Admit it.

"She's not wrong," said Lune, "I hadn't noticed, but these powerful levels of technique use... they're synthetic. Specifically, the energy signature of a technique-specialist cyborg. That would explain why you have been alive for long enough to recognise us and use the old greetings correctly even though there are clearly no cryogenic facilities here. Why would an Orakian cyborg pretend to be a Layan priest, though?"

"They ARE Layan priests," said Laya softly, striding through the corridor with her usual regal grace as though there were no threat at all, "This is a very old facility indeed. Orakio and Laya worked so closely back at this point that they were still designing joint projects like this. Orakio's research department never had the basic understanding of techniques to make a cyborg this powerful a technique-user. We couldn't make cyborgs full stop. This sort of thing happened all the time when we were at peace, though. And these are truly cyborgs of peace. Such a thing existed, back then. We used them to oversee long term storage of records that were too important to ever decay."

"And we still keep them, Divine Queen."

Sari breathed out slowly, staring up at the ceiling, "Well, I'll be. Actual proof that this whole 'Laya and Orakio working together' thing is real."

"So, you are convinced?" asked Laya.

"I've always been keen on the idea myself, to be honest," said Sari, "I don't like conflict for the sake of it. It means losing out on allies when you could be working together to conquer more of the world faster."

"You worry me sometimes," said Thea, "Okay, what are these records? What exactly are we here to do? Wasn't it something to do with Siren's rifle?"

"Ah yes, the weapons given to Orakio, Laya and the three Divine Generals," said the old man, "They are collected together now, are they not? Your prediction was correct, General Siren. So we can begin the ritual."

"There's a ritual now?" Sari frowned.

"We call it the ritual of Nei, after an ancient word of power from the homeland itself," said the old man, "It means 'to become other than human'. Whether that means more than human or less than human depends on your intention and your strength of will to enact that plan. I trust you, of course, my Queen, and I see no conflict in your heart, Alair. The others I see are fighting their own battles and firmly intend to win. This is enough for us to at least entrust you with enough power to do so."

"By our homeland, you mean the world we escaped from on this ship," said Laya.

The old cyborg nodded, "This ritual will connect you to a network of power that still exists within the world of Algol. To try and rely on something so far away... it has its own risks. We will not lie, there were experiments in here that did not go well. Actually, that is why some of the things exist in here that are disturbing. The dead who cannot rest... there is such thing as a literal lost soul, grasping out for at least something. They are grateful to you for at least the small mercy of banishing them from life."

"You're not encouraging me to go ahead with your plan," Thea pointed out.

"Oh, that no longer happens. The ritual is now whole and perfect. The technique 'Grantz' can be passed on. And after that, there is another step we require you to take... there is a facility that can do another ritual that we cannot. That will unlock the true power hidden within these weapons when they were forged, a power that was not supposed to be used except in a crisis that threatens the entire world."

"So, one of those is really happening right now, is it?" asked Sari.

"You know in your heart the answer. You are Alis. You can feel both the child and the mother crying out, demanding that they not lose each other to the devourers that live in the new worlds," said the old cyborg, now sounding frantic, like one possessed, "Do you know what the 'other than human' aspect of the Nei is? The Rykrosian entity. The spirit than can fill anything in the solar system through the stardust that bore it. That is not a force for good or evil... simply something so much more vast and powerful than us that it can destroy us without thinking, except that it is aware of the position of every particle in Algol. And we are part of Algol. One of these beings is the Dark Force, but even that darkness is only a dark light, and there is so much more to the overall force that created us..."

"Stop ranting," snapped Sari, "I can't stand people ranting at me, okay? I don't mind inheriting power, learning to control it, saving the ship or whatever. It's just another warrior's discipline to learn for me. I want what's best for the world I plan to rule one day. But I swear I'm not this Alis Landale lady and I don't have any ghostly memories of a solar system I've never even seen a picture of or..."

They were all staring at her. She glared back, bearing her teeth.

"What?", she hissed.

"None of us ever once said her surname was Landale."

"Bloody Rappy shit in a Hewn spell!" Sari screamed, "Well... well, I still say I would have made a better La Shiec, so there!"

"Honestly, that would do just as well," said the old cyborg, "Memories are memories. Now, could we begin the ritual?"


	12. Mieu - Lashute

"I gather you also had something to talk to me about," said Rulakir. 

Mieu had not noticed him come in but her battle programming caused her to already sense him on the scanner long ago, her hands already slotted into her claws, her head already cocked to one side as she fixed him a glare of warning that told him he hadn't done anything to provoke her just yet but she was always wary of people she wasn't quite sure were on her side, despite what her allies said. 

She had been watching Ayn through a display terminal that she had found for herself without permission, despite the technicians swearing the place was unhackable. The ritual was supposed to be completely sealed, a secret mystery of the Guild, but he didn't care overly as Dark Force had only declared the ritual a secret two months ago and it had only been possible three months ago, and besides, the cyborg viewing it remotely wasn't really affecting the ritual at all. It probably couldn't much if the one partaking in the ritual had no idea they were being observed. I mean, an intelligent man called Ayn probably guessed that at least someone was watching them but had probably guessed it would be Rulakir himself, not knowing how extremely disrespectful of a man's personal journey through the space memories of Algol that would be. As long as he did not know the full details and it wasn't distracting him from the ritual (not that the ritual wasn't good in itself at keeping people's attention on it) it was probably not a threat. Besides, the rules were often slightly more relaxed when it came to cyborgs, who held a special relationship with the mechanical side of Algol, the many vast control systems that kept the place habitable and stopped the wrathful weather, some of it the result of earlier control systems malfunctioning when they were tainted by the alien influence of Motherbrain, from tearing itself apart.

No, Mieu could watch her intended if she really wanted to. She would come to learn in time that we were all brides and grooms of the will of Algol.

"I can see from how you look at him, the worry on your face, that he genuinely matters a lot to you," said Rulakir, "Your emotional range is quite advanced. Are you built to command others?" 

"Myself, no," she said, "I had a sister who was higher ranking than me. A batch mate with heavy modifications made. Her personality was subtly different to mine in a way that gave her the quirk of volunteering for literally everything. I always joked with her that she had Dark Force's own luck, that nothing she had allowed to be implanted in herself had gone wrong so far, that everything only made her stronger. She would shrug and say that most of the really glaring bugs were ironed out before the phase where she would be asked to install them. After all that she had done to her, she was supposed to be more durable than me, as well as stronger, faster, with a more advanced strategic mind..."

"But you were the one who survived," he said, surprisingly gently. Mieu looked genuinely puzzled at this. Mostly mechanical himself, the Guildmaster had so far showed every sign of having a worse ability to empathise with humans than Wren did - when Wren was turned off. Did he feel differently about her because she was a machine? Only one other man ever spoke to her like this, as though she were a person, and right now that man was starting to really annoy her with the way he so glibly agreed to things that even her sister would have said no to - and then probably shot the person who asked her in the face.

"She volunteered for all the difficult missions, too," said Mieu, "And she came out of every one of them victorious. She was considered to be on par with General Siren, although she had no ambition to actually rise that far in the ranks - in the end, she discovered that she quite liked being on her own, so commanding an army wouldn't really be for her. But it wasn't even a difficult mission when we lost each other. We had both met Orakio in person - a great honour - and we had been told to wait for him to come back. I was sent to Aquatica, Miun was stationed in Aridia. We were just waiting around. Then the lasers from the moon came down... I was found, eventually. Miun never was. She was hit a lot worse, the thing was actually pointed at Aridia, and her logic circuits malfunctioned. While I figured out Orakio wasn't coming back, found shelter and went looking for help, she just stood there, wandering in circles, waiting for him to come back, probably getting more and more angry, knowing my sister..."

"Fate does not work properly in a place like this," he announced, "There is too much interference, it is too far away, to receive the necessary signals. This is but the first of many symptoms of a disease that will swallow this place one day."

I see your agenda now, she thought.

"However, that is not what I believe your main concern to be right now, am I correct? He is in danger, yes, but it is something he can overcome, and a battle every man must fight for themselves. It is a long way back home, even for a soul that can fly a lot faster than a starship."

"I still do not understand why it has to be him," she said, "You called me the... Myau? Would I not suffice?"

"A Lutz is a very different creature to a Myau," he smiled, "And you cannot take back your past, little sister. You cannot be the one to volunteer now. I suggest you be yourself, not a replacement Miun. I realise I am probably not the person you want life advice off right now, not with what I've become, but believe me, I have worked hard to find out what I truly am, to redefine myself after my old purpose has gone, after all my old friends have left this world."

"You fight the forces of change so much because they took things from you?" guessed Mieu.

"Indeed, but why do you fight, little sister? He fights for you, and for his world, but do you fight for him, or merely let him fight for you in your stead? Are you sure you are entirely satisfied with everything he has planned for you? I have yet to hear it from your perspective, this... great moment in your own life, and rather revolutionary moment in your society, though it has been done before."

"Believe me, he would not have been able to do so much unless I had planned it for him, and he asks for my approval constantly. This current decision of his irritates me no end, but if I truly found a reason to escape from it, I would do so."

"And leave him behind to suffer the consequences?"

"There will be consequences for him if I leave? Why, is that a threat, Guildmaster?" she idly flexed her claws, one finger at a time.

"I merely wish to establish the bonds of loyalty between you. I find the idea of such a marriage fascinating. Many of us here bond with our machines, as operator-servant to a master-system that is a great component of the ship, sometimes hard wiring ourselves into them in a manner we cannot reverse, or literally fusing the machines to our flesh if they are small enough. But to bond with an AI as an equal, as two people who wish to converse only as people, who even feel emotions such as love towards each other..."

"You are speaking to me rather presumptuously for one who professes to worship me," she said, thinking, oh dear, that really did sound like something my sister would say!

"But this is my point, do you not see? You are the most human machine I have ever met, and it does not seem that it was really all that intentional on the manufacturer's part. Is this a matter of nurture rather than nature, I wonder?"

"I also wonder what happened to you to make you the way you are. Such information would help me make great leaps in the psychiatric profession."

"Indeed, I have never claimed to be sane. But how does sanity thrive in a world driven mad in its exile?" he sighed, "Let me ask another question, then. Something more practical. I have so far involved him too much in the process without asking anything of you, after all. What exactly do you want in your husband - assuming you truly, in your heart, want to marry? I can show you a whole catalogue of cyborg frames and systems I can reproduce, different programs I can run on them. And we can discuss the exact ratio of machine to flesh..."

"Without him being there? This seems like something we should discuss together."

"A cyborg's wishes take priority in the Guild, even a cyborg as human as you. He does not have to be a model than resembles him at all, you know," he continued, ignoring her deathly glare, "I could even make a Siren model. I think the old one is on its way out, so we need a new one of such a beautiful model in the world."

"It was you, wasn't it," she suddenly realised, "You were Siren's husband?"

"Technically her wife. There have been a lot of modifications. To both of us. She came out the more beautiful."

"Something went wrong," she continued, "With your marriage. Either with the relationship or the mechanics. And it's turned you how you are."

"Ever more observant than I am, who pretends to still be human," he sighed.

"Just bring my fiance back safely from wherever he is right now," she ordered him, looking at the view screen again and noting that he himself refused to look, "It doesn't seem like a pleasant place at all."

"No, I imagine it isn't. But it is a crucible that will forge you a good blade. You, and the whole of Algol."

With those words, he strode from the chamber and left her alone.


	13. The Twin Rituals

The darkness of space and the light of the stars. The sacred unchanging oneness of being and the endless creation and destruction that were both products of a cycle as old as time. Necessary conflict and death and the joy they brought simply by allowing everything to continue in the shape it was always intended.

Twinness. To compensate without conflicting. 

Algol was its light and its dark.

 

The two ceremonies were never designed to be undertaken in tandem but that was exactly what happened. Twin messages broadcast halfway across a galaxy to a star system that was supposed to be sealed off from its often aggressive neighbours and the predatory things out there that drifted through greater space and ate entire cycles of narrative, systems of reality. Contacts only made possible by the laws of things that were too vast for this dimension, that drifted in such high orders of existence that they could find angles where they were still connected to both Algol and the drifting exile-ship. Pleas to the pure, truthfully illuminating light and the mercifully concealing darkness in unison, spheres of black and white that spiraled around each other in a void where pure information reigned, twirling in a helix, like the dance of the binary stars that were Algol's suns. Through a place surging with unfettered energy, a place where the limits of what could exist without overloading and destroying the vessels of reality did not exist, they journeyed, taking care to avoid the meme-things that could devour and assimilate them into their own forms, the surges of wildly crackling energy that would tear them into meaningless component parts. The minds of the two humans at prayer - although at this stage it did not matter that they were human, only that they had self-aware consciousnesses that could expand to fill the space - were only dimly aware of the channels they were projecting their thoughts along. To them, it seemed as if they were hurtling through a pulsing tunnel of raging static, watching through opaque walls as they traversed seas of shimmering fractal energy in painfully bright colours that mixed in with each other in patterns of infinite recursion until they fell into points where the numbers were too impossibly small to return from, expanding out into logical infinity. This was what techniques were made of, Alair understood, where they drew their power from. It was a dimension slightly above the reality affecting the techniques where near-limitless energy could be dragged sideways into the physical world. The most terrifying thing about it, other than the fact that they would be annihilated in a millisecond by the forces already tugging them around like a kite in a hurricane, straining their sanity to near breaking point as they struggled to comprehend the enormity of what their minds were trying to process, if the ritual wards ever failed, was that this was not even the deepest, fundamental level of existence. Alair had never gotten close to the next level down but she had heard rumours of those who had, mostly Guild fanatics and the occasional crazy robots who invariably described it as if it were machine code for the Universe.

Ayn did not understand it at all, he simply tried his best to swim with the flow and not be dashed upon any metaphysical rocks. Something in the most obscure recesses of his memory, behind doors of his mind that these torrents of energy were unsubtly battering against until they were torn open, knew this place as the Edge of Darkness. This wasn't really his memory, of course, it was that of Lutz, the other person he was supposed to be, except not, he was some sort of ritual substitute and there was another Lutz, and this Lutz was someone else as well, because the real Lutz had been around for thousands of years in one form or another... Ayn shook his head. This wasn't going to be the most maddening thing he had to deal with, he suspected.

He wondered if there was an Edge of Light too, whether that was where the other sphere of ego was going. Thinking about the other traveler caused him to edge too close to them, to become too much like them in allowing his thoughts to consist of them, which was dangerously close to crashing into them and becoming them. He veered wildly away again as he slammed down his mental shields that he had been taught during the preparation for the ritual, wards of solitude and purity of existence. Nostalgia in Solitude, were the words he had been taught, the secret technique given to all those who were forced to be away from Algol for any reason. Himself and Algol, the way he connected to Algol, how he observed Algol and Algol observed him. 

Back on track, his mind hurtled upwards as though he was in his shuttle again and had hit the afterburners without warning and...

He woke up somewhere warm and dark. With... cats?

* * *

"We were seriously considering sending some of us to stow away with you, meow," said the voice in his head, soft and warm and purring like any cat, absolutely huge compared to any feline he had ever met. It occurred to him that it was odd for a cat that could clearly speak Palman to still be meowing mid-sentence.

"I do not speak your language, meow, I am telepathically translating. The meow is... a cultural thing hard to translate. It is important to me, so I do not leave it out."

"Fair enough," he replied. He tried to speak out loud but could not. In fact, he could not even move his body. In his effort to say the words, he projected them loudly into his mind, causing the cat's mind to flinch.

"There is no need to shout, although I appreciate that you are new to using this system," the cat responded, "I see. You are used to speaking with both Orakians and Layans who are two tribes of Palmans foreign... hostile?... to each other. That sounds complicated, meow, Palmans do love their politics, don't they? I apologise for trespassing upon thoughts you are trying you are trying to keep secret but you have absolutely zero mental defences in place, meow."

"I've met cats before, you know, and they have their own share of territory fights."

"Not Musk Cats, meow. There are few of us as it is and we decided upon a higher purpose for ourselves long ago," corrected the cat, "As I was saying, several of us wanted to come with you to keep you company but it seemed like a bad idea. It isn't like hitching a lift to Dezolis on a mining barge. It's okay for you Palmans to be away from Algol for that long, there are things like you all over the galaxy for some reason anyway, but we're important to this solar system and it's very bad for us to be away for too long. Besides, who ever heard of cats living somewhere other than Algol?" 

"Why can't I speak or move?"

"You're not physically here, meow, your senses are just good at convincing you are. It's like a really vivid dream, meow," replied the cat, "The Motavians didn't come anywhere near your ships either, and the Dezolisians were banned from it by their Church. Even when it meant the ones on Palma couldn't evacuate. Meow, a lot of your own ships didn't make it out of Algol! I saw some land on Motavia, some on Dezolis, a lot of them land badly and not make it anywhere except the spirit realm. And there are weirdoes in the asteroid belt you lot might need to deal with, because it looks like your fault so we certainly aren't, meow?"

"Um... is there a reason I'm here?"

"I don't know, meow, you're the one who came."

"I thought I was learning about the dark side of Algol and then learning a technique called Megido, not talking to cats."

"Cats don't learn Megido, meow. If one of us is messing about with forces that dangerous, they're going to get a cuff around the ear, meow."

"Then where the hell am I supposed to go?" asked Ayn, suddenly frustrated, "Why was I sent here in the first place? What am I doing wrong?" 

“Hm, there’s a possibility that we accidentally intercepted your signal. We just sit and wait and see what comes through the channels quite a lot, meow. We know something big and dangerous is going to happen but we don’t really know what. So as it might be our fault and you’ve been fairly polite to us, I’ll give you a lift somewhere, okay?”

“Give me a lift? But I’m not really here and you’re a cat and...”

As if a flame was lit, a golden shape shimmered into life in the middle of the darkness. It was a cat, and yet it was something more majestic that all other cats aspired to be. The size of Thea in dragon form, its fur was like fine gold silk, flowing in perfectly groomed waves down strong, sleek shoulders and haunches. Its bushy tail and the tufts of its long elegant ears swished like dancing flames. Its eyes shone green as a Rykrosian crystalline vista. From its back unfurled a pair of angelic white wings. 

“I’ll take you to Rykros. They teach everyone else about Megid on Rykros and anyway, it’s been ages since I last went. It’s in a good range for travel from Dezolis at the moment. Getting on board?”

* * *

Meanwhile, Thea found herself on a snow-capped plateau, an endless expanse of white, pure and unspoilt fields as far as her eyes could make out. She couldn't actually see much - the sky was also blindingly white, streaked with golden rays of sun that did little to fend off the biting chill, while heavy flakes of snow swirled around her head in the gale that howled all around her, merciless as a wolf. She saw tall, broad trees, stout conifers whose tips were lost in the clouds. Somewhere in the distance, she saw the shapes of mountains. Closer, she saw a shape that looked more like someone had carved it out of a gleaming red stone - a tall, spindly tower, its spires curved and tapered at the end as if to resemble the flames that roared inside ornately carved beacons set into the arches, domes and buttresses like several stars to accompany the twin suns. 

Thea trudged on through snow almost up to her knees, battling the winds that tried to drag her back, her eyes set on the tower even though every second threatened to get her lost in the swirling snow. She noted that she couldn't really feel the cold. In fact, she didn't even feel the pain and exhaustion that should have come with just moving, despite a vague awareness that it was taking her a large amount of time and effort. Or, at least, this was happening to someone - she felt detached from it all, as if observing it happening to someone far away from her own slow, hazy reality. Despite this disconnection from reality, however, she still felt as though this was all important, that the untouched sacred silence of this place resonated within her own spirit. This looked like Frigidia but it wasn't, she realised, she never felt like this going anywhere near that land, even though it was supposed to be the site of the 'Castle of Silence' that was holy to all Layans, as well as some kind of major Guild installation and a village on the water that absolutely nobody was allowed into. No, this was on a whole different magnitude. That fire... it had something to do with the fires in the temple that didn't go out even in this raging snowstorm. The fire in the sky, too, how bright it was, dangerously so as it reflected off the snow. That light...

Wasn't she supposed to be here for something to do with light?

As she approached the place, she saw figures milling around it, some of them looking relaxed as they tended to fragile-looking gardens, others praying, yet others in some kind of ritual procession. They were tall, spindly figures, with something not quite human about them, and she didn't understand their language at all.

As she approached, a couple of them turned their heads towards her. They smiled and nodded. It was a thin smile, creasing a heavily wrinkled face that was dull green, like a toad. Whatever life form this was - and it was not a human - it seemed to be an old one of its species, from the slow, laborious way it moved, the peace in its dark but somehow compassionate eyes. The alien gestured towards the door with gaunt, bony fingers underneath a long white robe, then the tall stone door rumbled open, somehow failing to let in a drift of snow. 

"I'm not sure what you want with our tower, though," he said, still smiling as he waved her in, "You have plenty enough fire of your own. We could learn from you, we could!"

It hadn't occurred to her to try and turn into her dragon form. Would it work, if she could barely get her body to recognise its own existence? The alien had implied that it at least wouldn't cause problems in this place, which was mostly stone, or fires of their own. The ceilings certainly seemed high enough to fit a dragon, the corridors broad enough. The old one had implied that they already had dragons here and didn't seem all that impressed by them. Would she find others of her kind there?

Maybe it was expected of her. After all, this was a quest of the mind, specifically made for her, and it was a part of her identity very unique to her, and someone had even gone out of her way to mention it, and she was not supposed to be overthinking things in a state of existence so much like a dream where she might get herself kicked out if she didn't follow its logic and surrender to its rhythm.

The change came instantaneously. There was a winding staircase ringed by balconies with small cells set into them. She saw prayer rooms and studies but also rooms that looked more like state offices and healer's clinics and battle technique training grounds. This place fulfiled many functions. It truly meant everything to these people... yet there were no other dragons... She took off and soared higher up the building, staying away from the stairs that were too busy to be wide enough for a dragon as well. None of the other priests and monks seemed to notice Thea was there, despite her size and sudden winged ascent of their building. She guessed that people in general weren't supposed to be able to sense her and the old man at the door had either been specially selected by some force or other, or he was simply a lot more psychically sensitive in his advanced level of priestly studies. He didn't seem to have said anything to the others either, but had returned to staring out into the snowstorm.

As if it was the most natural thing in the Universe that she should be here...

Reaching the highest level of the tower, she found herself in a smaller chamber that led up to the roof via a hatch. It was sealed to keep out the snow but it rumbled open as she approached, as had the last door. On a balcony on the very highest point on the tower, where maybe a bell would be in a normal church, there was another flame, larger and brighter and hotter, swirling around, a strange dull blood-red. The heat was uncomfortable even for her spirit body, as if the flame was something more of the ethereal than the real itself, although she also saw it melt the snow around the laconia bowl where it was set, burning eternally from nothing. She could feel the technique energy radiating from it as well, dwarfing anything she had ever been foolish enough to venture too close to.

Dwarfing the sun itself, which was now drawing behind a very sudden, total darkness that closed in from out of nowhere, bring a chill down her spine. Instinctively, she edged closer to the flame, ignoring the pain, until she felt her scales brush against it, saw the smoke rise as she was singed, branded with a mark that would not go away...

The fire sputtered momentarily, sending up ashes that rose into the blackness of the empty sky. Ashes in red, gold, white and blacker than black, even, impossibly, the green of her own scales... 

Suddenly they weren't ashes swirling in the eternal winter breeze but shapes soaring, majestic beasts in flight somewhere far up ahead, the light of the flames glinting off their scales. Dragons. She could recognise them even from that far away. No, she could hear their minds, calling for her to join them...

"Sorry," she called back, shaking her massive head, "But I think I'm here for a specific purpose and I'll be busy doing it once someone tells me how the hell it works."

"What is it you seek?" asked one of them, the largest, a lone black dragon, "I'll help you find it. We have been here the longest except the spirit-ones and know where everything is. Except Algol's lost. You were lost and you returned to us. This is a good day."

"But I'm not really here and I might have to go back."

"Bah, what is 'real'? What does it matter if something is in body or spirit? The spirit-ones are both here and there, and to them, body and spirit are one and the same. A spirit-one brought you, yes?"

"I... don't know."

"Oh, I see. Even the spirit-one is lost," he frowned, "But I know where they live, the remaining ones, and can find you plenty of others. Is there another in particular you were told to find?"

"I don't really know... Grantz," she suddenly remembered, "I was told to learn a technique called Grantz."

"Oh, yes, I've met people who know that," the dragon told her confidently, "I can get you there, no problem. We'll all come. We've not all been told the news, just that something is happening and the cat-ones are on the move too, and when they come out of their holes, you know something's about to go down. So we're a little indignant at being the second oldest and largest and still not hearing about the news straight away."

"Um... size isn't everything," she said, turning into her human form to demonstrate.

"Oh, yes, you're right, that's quite pretty, in a fragile sort of way. You'd find a mate if you stayed, you know."

Thea gave her opinion of his suggestion quite directly and colourfully, then they were off, into the sky.

The eclipse rolled back again to allow the silver light to wash over the icy, unwelcoming, secret places of Dezolis.


	14. Upon Rykros

Rykros was a place that had been both inside and outside of Algol from the beginning and it showed. There was something profoundly alien about it. Both silent and constantly ringing with an unearthly choir of crystalline chimes and winds that wound around each other in time to some kind of perfect harmony, a wavelength of pure informational order, of clear sound and bright light. It was unoccupied, incapable of supporting life in any meaningful sense as it was too small for a proper atmosphere and contained little but windswept rock, and yet it was constantly full of jubilantly thriving life signals, all pulsating with immense levels of technique energy as they never stopped moving and channeling technique after technique around the planet. Its inhabitants were invisible, or when they did take form, too difficult to tell apart from the scenery to be spotted unless they made their presence deliberately known. However, they did build structures - there were four known towers, half-grown, half-carved from the craggy green rock and pink crystal veins. There were more, sealed off until they were needed, which hadn't been for a long time. The atmosphere was artificially controlled as well, solely by force field techniques that were unnervingly invisible and tended to shift around a lot when entities visited the planet who needed different atmospheric conditions to survive. The natives themselves did not particularly care about the physical condition of their world, other than it would be purged of anything that interfered with their efforts to keep it spotlessly clean. It was simply a large, aesthetically pleasing ball of shiny rock for them to conduct information and techniques through (there was little difference between the two on their level of existence, one was merely active forms of the language they spoke and the other passive), and to pull rough physical shells out of when they needed to interact with lesser planes. 

There had been an attempt to mine Rykros once. It had gone particularly badly, even considering that space industry was still a risky and new field with a lot of industrial accidents and economic losses through expensive equipment being wrecked, firstly by the draconian Emperor La Shiec's indifference to the lives of his workers, then by the Mother Brain's refusal to admit Her many major system faults. The Laconia mining operation on Dezolis, the largest scale attempt at colonisation of the often hostile planet in the history of Algol, was listed as the worst disaster in recent history apart from Palma's destruction, of course. Poisonous gas leaks, Motherbrain's mining equipment going homicidally awry, constant reports of (and this was a direct quote) giant zombie rabbits... the horrors of Dezolis' resistance to ever being tamed were etched into the Palman subconscious. But this was only seen as dramatic because the Rykros incident had never been recorded. There hadn't been enough survivors, mechanical or biological. Rykros had swallowed them all - simply rippled and shifted to allow them in and closed up behind them. The planet didn't need fuel but it didn't say no to donations. The crystals shone brightly that night, guiding the way for more innocent Algolian pilgrims coming to petition Le Roof for aid on the destiny ahead of them in the great and phantastical cycle of legend. 

It was these cautionary tales that the cats regaled Ayn with as they flew to the wandering planet, which was indeed at its closest point to the planets of Algol, so the journey was swift and easily within the ability of the transformed felines to keep up shielding techniques, a speciality of theirs, while they were in the vacuum of space. The Prince's protestations that he didn't want to know that about the planet he was heading to were pointedly ignored with twitched whiskers and swished tails. Just don't do any mining and you'll be fine, they assured him, cats hate mining as well, with all the smell and noise and rocks falling on their head when they were trying to sleep. If they caught Palmans tearing apart their comfortable, warm caves, the result also tended to be messy - usually not because of things done by themselves, they reassured him, there were other animals in the caves a lot bigger and hungrier than cats. The extreme danger of owls was a common topic on their way to Rykros as well.

The dragons cared just as little about the vacuum of space - it was actually news to Thea that she could survive space travel and was one of the many factors of being a dragon that she discussed on the way to the gleaming planet the colour of agate and rose quartz. Not all dragons were the same, they impressed upon her once again, and she would be even more different, what with her origins being rather alien by now. They had no idea how much the dragon gene had mutated in other directions while they were separated from the normal Algolian stock - they had never even heard of a dragon having a humanoid form, for a start, and assumed that they had, against all probability, or possibly with some very precise genetic and magical engineering, successfully cross-bred with Palmans. They were disgusted to hear of the creation of evolutionary regressive guard dragons, and that there were so few varieties of true dragon in general apart from the greens.

One of them added that the correct colour for a royal dragon was golden. But, she immediately pointed out, that particular individual was a golden dragon himself.

Despite their differences, she did manage to learn some useful tips about being a dragon by the time they reached Rykros, if nothing much about any other subject. She was well aware that she still barely knew anything about Algol, the place she had come here to learn about. She supposed that dragons, with their majesty and their fire, counted as beings of light, the main topic she was interested in. Besides, she had many personal reasons for wanting to know as much as possible about the entity she was turning into.

"We're not really experts on Algol ourselves, to be honest. A lot changes very rapidly and we are old, creatures of habit," admitted the talkative gold dragon who fancied himself their leader, "You would be better to ask a Rykrosian once we get there. Le Roof is the one who watches the tides of history the most."

"They'll want to ask you about a billion and one questions themselves," added a large black dragon, yawning and putting a paw over his mouth, "So if you don't know how long you can manifest in spirit in this world, you'll have to be blunt with them, tell them not to waste your time and only tell you what you need to know."

"You were looking for the Grantz technique, right?" the gold dragon asked, "Now that's an old one. Old and kind of rare. I don't think any lesser species know it at all by now. I'm not sure if your essence is even large enough to cast it. If you're gearing up to use Grantz, I worry about your future a little, to be honest. Grantz is for protecting things from very large impacts, we're talking 'Grantz might have saved Palma if you were lucky'. I mean, the good thing is, you'll hopefully know Grantz, but you still have to very fast and very persistent and very, very watchful if you're going to be the sort of protector who gets to use Grantz."

"Well, I'm glad they were at least sensible enough to give it to a dragon," said the black dragon, "We'll be rooting for our cousins beyond the stars, if it means anything. We're nearly there. Hopefully they've remembered to leave us a landing strip this time. They usually do."

The atmosphere of Rykros, which was already fairly thin due to not needing to protect all that much that couldn't protect itself - strips of the planet often just randomly floated into space like a self-generating asteroid belt - parted to allow them, and they landed on a smooth crystalline runway. They explained that they were not personally invited to the Silence Temple, only permitted entry to escort the guest, although they were allowed to have a look around the planet, which they all wandered off to do, with a fond farewell.

Then she was alone in front of a door that looked as though it was carved from a single enormous yellow gem. It rang out with a perfect chime as it slid away with a gentle push, allowing her inside. There was a silence in here she associated more with busy machine centres, too vital to the operation of the planet for humans to be allowed inside, than strange crystal towers on barren planets. Not that she had been inside any of the latter before. The closest she had come was the time Laya let her have a peek inside Mystoke.

Corridors ringed the inner chamber in a surprisingly straight geometric shape for such an organic-looking exterior. They were sealed with doors that did not move to her touch, so she continued on to the interior. 

She pushed open the door...

And at the same time, a lone figure retreated from a throng of loudly arguing cats, stepped into a lonely tower in a mountain valley clearing that had already been opened for him, and ascended a few flights of stairs, not many at all. There were a few battles to test him, enormous primeval creatures with spiny bat wings that hovered and sliced with claws the size of his torso and breathed flame. He wasn't sure quite how he won, not to mention how wounding and pain and blood streaming down his limbs even worked in a dream reflection of a world, but he almost collapsed at the top of the stairs when he pushed open the final door...

And found himself plunged into darkness. Darkness and a jeweled wheel of flame that spoke to him.

* * *

"You know, you didn't have to come all the way here just to learn the history of Algol."

Thea looked up at the celestial entity in unbaashed wonder. It had been a while since she had been able to look up at anything, much less in wonder, since turning into a dragon. Some other dragons were a little taller than her but she had discovered that size was mostly a matter of attitude and with the way most of them bickered like children over who was superior in their tiny, insulated pecking order, she was frankly more cowed by her mother. This thing in front of her was genuinely something else, something on a whole order of existence higher than her. And, from what she could tell, it was much, much larger. Not that it was easy to tell which way is up, or comparative size, when you were facing an entity that looked like a spiral galaxy. Probably not a full size one but it still took up more space than could possibly have been in the room. When she asked about this, Le Roof had answered that it was a type of hologram, an illusory image  created using technology.  She was still sceptical that even the most powerful illusion could create more space in a room than there was. I mean, anyone could paint a room to look more spacious but she had tested it was really that size. Several times. It was really starting to irritate Le Roof. She realised she should probably have a different reaction to seeing something so vast and pure and serene that it was the embodiment of knowledge and wisdom but, she supposed, this was just her way of dealing with things that were difficult for her fragile sanity to reconcile. Besides, real learning came from experimentation, from doing and not just reading, and she wasn't afraid to lecture even a deity of raw intelligence on her beliefs. 

"I distinctly remember leaving a sect of scholar-priests on a secluded island. I called it Neo Mota," said Le Roof, "Or did they leave behind their duties for all of these hollow promises of exploration and discovery? It's the scam that will ruin this solar system in the end, you know. This obsession you Palmans have with abandoning a perfectly well written story in favour of an empty page just because you think you can write a better story yourself."

"We're not getting anywhere, are we?" she sighed, "I can barely remember why  I even came here in the first place. The dragons warned me about you."

"I do apologise. I'm not quite what I used to be. That's what comes of living on a planet that keeps leaving its homeland behind all the time. It's bad for the soul, but someone has to keep an eye on what's happening outside Algol in case it decides to pay us a visit, and we Rykrosians are the only things strong enough to face that corruption and still be anything like the same. If only I could turn your ship into something else capable of enduring my load," Le Roof sighed, a sound like an ion wind, "But I've seen how that ends. And anyway, that wasn't what you were brought here for."

"Grantz," she said, "I was brought here to learn Grantz. I think I'm supposed to protect the whole ship against something awful that's going to happen."

"Yes, the battle is inevitable, isn't it?" Le Roof sighed again, "And I thought I could rely on Neo Mota to store the spells to protect you all. But Grantz, Grantz is awkward, I suppose, because it comes from the Light. I know someone who can definitely help you."

"Oh, I'm getting handed off to someone else AGAIN?" she growled.

"Don't worry, they're just around the corner from here. Go to the Temple of Courage and ask for De-Vars. Tell them I sent you. It shouldn't be too complicated after that."


	15. Betrayal

"The Forces of Light are already on the move," said Re-Faze, "We're going to have to hurry this along. They already have an advantage over us - there hasn't been proper training on how to fight Light-based enemies for millennia. No matter what Le Roof might tell you, our archive is a lot more seriously corrupted than they make out, and most of it is edits to the records relating to the Great Light to make them seem like some kind of righteous victors. They weren't even the victors, you know..."

"They were kicked out and the Dark Force was imprisoned. Except the Dark Force can get out and it sounds like the Great Light is coming back. I get it," Ayn sighed, "This might go a lot quicker if you just give me some clear instructions rather than just throwing obvious illusions of Lyle and Miun at me?"

"Ah, but then you wouldn't feel the rage and the frustration you need to unlock the right part of your soul. It's about the spirit of the thing, not the technique."

"It's literally called a technique," pointed out Ayn.

"Look, you could use it coldly and efficiently, but what kind of psychopath would that make you? The techniques you use start to shape your soul, you know."

"I hope not. Generally speaking I only know useless techniques and I'm lousy at them," Ayn sighed, "There's really no other way to do this? Some kind of anti-meditation? With loud music or something?"

"I could fight you directly until the latent knowledge is torn out of your bleeding soul. But you'd most likely die."

"Aren't there any other techniques that I could learn other than Megido? The Dark Force sounds like pratcically a demigod, he can't literally have just one technique."

"Oh, there are a few, but none of them are going to cut it if you're in situation where you need to cast a full Megido. If you really set your soul free, you could tear that ship of yours apart," said Re Faze, "Actually, that isn't a bad idea. It would end all our problems, probably all of yours as well, if you were just a cloud of space dust. Nothing outside of Algol, no pain or suffering for you ever again, no problems, ever. I've been telling Le Roof we should just channel all our energy into fully locking down Algol and then set this planet to blow."

"I bet you're popular during meetings," said Ayn.

"Hey, I'm just determined to do whatever it takes for Algol's spiritual integrity, and people respect me for that! It's you who isn't showing enough spirit."

"And you wonder why the Forces of Darkness are so unpopular."

"Trust me, you don't want to be popular. Crass popularity is the kind of promise that swayed the Light from the true path in the first place. Algol is old and tired, their story is done, and so on. Unpopular things are what I do, here in the shadows. And it's something you'll have to deal with yourself," said Re Faze, "As a Prince, not just as an inheritor of Megid. Hell, you're not even popular now. You think you're a hero? You're just the slacker who disappears all the time when your family need you the most."

"Hey, I got the go-ahead from my family!"

"Only because they knew you'd sneak off anyway. And then you won't even do your duty and produce an heir, you chase after totally unsuitable women instead... what, touched a nerve, have I?" Re-Faze cackled at his sudden growl as he reached for his sword, "I never said any of this was bad, Ayn. Someone has to do all of this, or your ship is doomed and you wouldn't have even found out you're on a ship. You'll have to do a lot worse things than that to a lot of people as a ruler capable of keeping order. Especially when the armies of the Dragon Empress and the Risen Alis begin to roll across the worlds. Oh yes, that will make the Orakio-Layan war look like a Church tea party. It won't really be ruining anything on the true grand scale of things, though, so there's no use looking to us for help. You'll be on your own with what you managed to learn from us here and now."

"You really are good at goading people, aren't you," said Ayn, "First you insult my family, then my friends. How are you even finding out all of this about a world outside your jurisdiction? Are you spying on us, or just stealing my thoughts?"

"Stealing? How can it be stealing when you still have them as well? Honestly, nobody shares these days. No, I should not need to remind you that I'm stuck on a  wandering planet, and that Rykros' system of deciding what to have visions of is suddenly so obsessed with you that I can't help but see everything you..."

That was when a screaming lance of light arced out of nowhere, punching straight through the diamond-hard crystal walls and the several layers of magical wards. Ayn  dove for cover but the beam hit Re-Faze straight in the core. The Rykrosian force of pure destructive fury made a garbled, high-pitched noise like a faulty machine, then was rocked backwards, cracks forming in their core, leaking crimson flame. The core glowed red and the flames whirled fast as a tornado. All around him, Ayn heard screeching and roaring and flapping as the Tower of Anger's guardian beasts all went berserk.

He heard the answering feral bellow of a familiar green dragon, now radiating silvery blue light as several tonnes of scaled fury ascended upon razor wings to stare him full in the face. 

"Thea?" he frowned, bemused.

"I knew it.  I knew you were up to something back there, but I didn't expect you to fall this far. Just... just die," she growled, then let out a burst of flame that was now a pure silver.

* * *

"It's not what you think," said Ayn, thinking back to all the times he'd had to say that to near-homicidal women in the past. He was grateful that none of the rest of them had been eight foot tall dragons who apparently breathed silver lightning even though they had only breathed ordinary fire last time you saw them, and also that when he got out of here alive, which he vowed he would do for Mieu's sake, he would hurry up making himself an honest gentleman so he was off that particular cut-throat market.

"What isn't how I think it is? You allying with Dark Force? You learning forbidden techniques? You plotting to destroy the ship?"

"Did you miss the bit where I told the flaming psychopath I wasn't going to help him destroy the ship under any circumstances?"

"No, but I heard the part where you agreed to steer the ship through a black hole and assassinate Algol's divine protector?"

"First of all, a neutron singularity, not a black hole. Secondly, Algol's 'divine protector' has been absent from the solar system since before we existed, and thirdly," Ayn frowned, "When exactly did you overhear that? I thought I would have heard something about it if a hostile dragon was running around Lashute!"

"Don't 'hostile dragon' me!" she snapped, "De-Vars told me all about your plan! They showed me everything!"

"Did you just say De-Vars is involved with this? Ayn, this could be dangerous, De-Vars was an ally of the Great Light before they were abandoned with the rest of their company. They're normally reliable when it comes to protecting Algol but they're still sympathetic with the Great Light, so they're far too biased to be involved with this!" warned Re-Faze.

"They said a lot of the same things about you, Tempter, and more besides!" retorted Thea, flexing her claws and striding towards the fiery being. Ayn backed further away, casting Deban. For all his psychic ineptitude, he did a good Deban. He got in a lot of practice. For some reason, people were constantly throwing things at him. He drew his sword and pointed it at her, his face suddenly a lot more serious.

"Thea, we've always been friends..."

"Barely!" she snapped.

"... And that's good enough. You're a sincere friend, even if we do want to kill each other quite a lot of the time, and that's something you appreciate growing up in a royal court where everyone wants something from you. But if you harm one blade of grass on Algol, even a metaphorical blade of grass on a planet with nothing growing on it and that barely counts as Algol, I will have to stop you."

"Hey, crystals grow!" protested Re-Faze.

"Ayn, I can understand you sincerely believe you're saving Algol in your own way. Dark Force has been manipulating you for a long time, hasn't he? He's probably been manipulating a whole lot of us for more generations than I even know existed, so don't feel bad. I act for the good of Algol too, to stop an ancient evil returning once again to a world that really needs to be free of it for once. A world that needs to finally rest."

"It's just as He said," breathed Ayn, "A rest. An end to the cycle of destiny. You're trying to destroy fate. Thea, do you understand what a 'final rest' is, what it means to be free of all pain, to know true peace? Death, Thea. You're resigning Algol to death." 

"We've been at war for so long on our little ship that peace must sound impossible without death, eh?" Thea sighed, "No, peace is possible, and without this deathly standstill you've been taught to fear. Exploration is possible without existential corruption."

"Not for Algol. Not right now. You don't understand how precarious the balance is right now," said Re-Faze, "This thing you've been told will suddenly bring peace, it's too harsh medicine for the system. Were you not taught 'if it's too good to be true, then it's not'?"

"That's exactly why I'm not just leaving it up to the Light. I'm learning a way to protect our ship, Algol, all of us."

"Protectors, eh? The Light sure does love that word. I've always told them, it comes off as though they're running a goddamn protection racket," Re-Faze sighed, "But, dragon lady... the thing is... that technique you're using, it isn't a shielding technique. If you've been told it's Grantz... well, it's not. I don't think it's even a formal technique. It looks like Lightshower. Now, I don't disapprove of Lightshower, it's a tactical monster on a battlefield, but..."

"Yes, I know, all right?" she snapped, her roar punctuated by another peal of thunder and crack of lightning that tore a hole out of the roof, "I tried. I tried to learn Grantz and I can't, I just don't have what it takes. I'm not built to protect. Dragons are Laya's living siege platforms. This is like the second prize. The goddamn silver medal."

"Hey, silver medals are something to brag about seeing as we've been chosen from the entire population of the ship," he said, "Also, I don't see anyone with a gold medal around here. You know who those probably go to? Natives. Let's face it, Thea, we're not Algolian enough any more. That's all there is to it."

"So, what, we're not welcome here? We just leave?" she sniffed, then breathed out a sigh, "Well, at least there's some good news: we don't have you tearing the whole place apart with Megido."

"No, I'm afraid I'm just as lousy with Megido as I am with simple healing and attack magic," he grinned, as if it was some sort of achievement, earning another growl from her, "But look, I never said anything about giving up. We'll find a way to save both worlds. One that we can agree on - that we decide for ourselves, maybe, not what we've been told to do by some celestial authority that can't even show their face in public."

"A third way, huh? Just like you found the most absurd way possible to get out of the duty of marriage?"

"Hey..." he growled, but they were cut off by another burst of laughter that sounded like a thunderstorm in a good mood. 

"I like your spirit," said another voice in his head. Re-faze made another noise similar to the one they had made when they were hit point blank with a full force Lightshower.

"De-Vars, you are NOT allowed in my tower without permission!" 

"Well, the roof was open," the light-based entity shrugged in a ripple of silver fire, "Anyway, I came to say, if you really are willing to co-operate with each other, I think I know a possible solution."

"What's with the change of heart? You don't normally pass up an opportunity to try and get me killed."

"We have more urgent problems right now than your continued existence, unfortunately," said De-Vars, "There's been another ripple in the fabric of the Great Light's narrative integrity. A massive one. Not the type you recover from. I think it might have just saved both your lives, kids," they added, "You were destined to kill each other off. That fate isn't working any more."

"Thanks for warning me," Thea sighed.

"Hey, I just make sure my half of the script gets read out properly," said De-Vars, "Except I think it came out garbled this time. For instance, I should have been given people who actually have latent Grantz and Megido techniques in their soul. The techniques use different energy sources to the others, you see, and most people aren't equipped to channel it, and, to put it bluntly, neither are you two. The wrong people were sent."

"So you decided to teach them non-technique magic? That's actually a surprisingly smart idea."

"Magic?" asked Ayn. He was used to that word only being said by people who really didn't understand techniques when describing techniques.

"Psychic abilities used before the technique system was officially set up," explained De-Vars, "Proto-techniques, if you will. If you ask Le Roof, they'll probably give you an unending lecture about them. All I can tell you is this: you can still just about use them if you train hard enough, and I think as long as you both wield something of great power that can be used to fight both dark and light, and you work together, you'll be okay against whatever's lying in wait for you."

"A word of warning, though: these are genuinely powerful," said Re-Faze, "They're not Grantz or Megido, although that just means you probably can't tear apart the entire ship at once by accident with them, but I've still seen them go catastrophically wrong. For instance, Ayn, the dark magic I'm about to teach you... it's been used to permanently destroy, without capacity for resurrection, someone who was supposed to be a major player in destiny."

"Will we have to do that if destiny is going as wrong as you say it is?" asked Thea.

"Well, someone's going to try and do it to you before long, so if I were you, I'd do it back to them," said Re-Faze.

"Nobody else is like you," said De-Vars.

"Well, that's just my unique, irreplaceable Algolian charm, isn't it?" retorted Re-Faze, "Let's fight hard to keep ourselves this way, because the nightmare we're going to be assimilated into if we don't, there's no coming back from."

"I'll learn it," said Ayn, "No matter the danger. It can't be worse than doing nothing."

"That's the spirit," said Re-Faze, "Now, the technique I'm teaching you is called the Black Energy Wave..."

As Mieu watched, Ayn became more and more cocooned in threads of pure black light. There was a determined look on his face.

She couldn't help imagine him as a Wren cyborg.

* * *

"I'm going to go home and report back, try and keep the place from falling into too much panic over my disappearance, then I'll head to Terminus and help you out with whatever it is exactly you plan to do next," said Thea, long after they had proven for what felt like the hundredth time that they could simultaneously cast Black Wave and Lightshower at a target without collapsing the entire Anger Tower on top of themselves. Their heads ached from the concentration involved, as did their eyes, and, for that matter, most of their muscles. Neither of them were sure exactly how that kind of pain worked when you were supposed to be in a dream world. True, vivid dreams did involve pain, but it mostly kicked you out and woke you up when it became too stressful. They debated a few times whether this was one of the sort of dreams where you actually died if something particularly bad happened to you in the narrative of the dream. It usually ended equally badly if you tried to metaphysically mess around with the dream in the hopes of cheating, though - sometimes even worse, including a particularly nasty urban legend about a high level technique user's soul being trapped forever in a recurring loop of dreams within dreams, his body long ago having rotted away. With this in mind, they mutually decided to stop thinking about it too much and just follow their hosts' instructions unless it sounded particularly suicidal.

"Well, some of it's rather private," Ayn scratched the back of his head, "And I'm not sure someone else can be much help, really. Besides, I'm not certain you can even get into Terminus. The shuttle was totaled, they don't have a spare one and the hole I made was sealed up after me by some security drones who are probably still out there trying to hunt me down and kill me."

"I'm sure I'll find a way. Laya said she might be able to go and pick up a spare control key for the shrines that she left in Mystoke. Failing that, there's another shuttle in Aerone that Lune doesn't want me to crash land in a hellhole as it's kind of the only way back home for him, but I'm sure I can get it into his thick skull that the place he was exiled to is not his real home, no matter how awesome it sounds like it would be to rule a moon palace, and that I'm in charge and I'm going to do whatever I damn well please with a space shuttle. And failing that, I'm a dragon, how dragon-proof can a barrier really be?"

"If I move out again to be wherever the hell Mieu decides she lives, remind me not to say no if you ask for the spare key," Ayn sighed.

"I would never let a friend make such a stupid decision, don't worry," she grinned, her teeth worryingly sharp, "Seriously, though, whatever you're going through with Mieu, I'd advise you go back and sort it out now. And I doubt it would work as an excuse if you say you've been with me the whole time."

"I don't need an excuse, I've done everything I came here to do."

"You're sure you just want to leave like that?" Thea frowned, "This is really Algol, you know. Our motherland that we've been in exile from for thousands of years. We might not be here in body but it's definitely the real Algol and I think us being here in spirit really counts. We might never get an opportunity like this again."

"We're going to come home," said Ayn, sounding more decisive than he ever had before, "Even if the Dark Force betrays me, I'll always remember this place and I swear I'll be the one to lead us home."

"We're pretty far out. How long do you expect it to take?"

"It won't matter. I have more than one reason now, to get rid of this short-lived human body. Not that the first reason wasn't important enough by itself."

"You sound as crazy as the Guildmaster guy you were describing. How long were you there for again?"

"Don't worry, I've not joined them. We're just co-operating for a goal we both care about."

"That's what I try and get people to believe when I scam them, too."

"Thea, look at this place. Look at the real sky with the real wind and the light from the moons," he said, peering upwards, "Tell me honestly that you wouldn't do anything to see this place again. Even if it means leaving it behind for a while."

She sighed, "You're right. And if you screw up, I'm going to flap all the way here myself. Dragons can fly in space, you know."

"I'm not even going to ask how you found that out," he sighed, "No, who am I to talk? I found out today that cats can fly in space."

"Did you say there are charts that show where we've been? I want to know how many pit stops I can make, so I can plan how much I need to pack."

"This planning is all very well, but you can do it back home, and you're technically draining your mental energy just by being here," said De-Vars, "You're probably going to need that once you get back."

"Well, goodbye. Nice meeting another wandering world," said Re-Faze.

"Um..." Ayn scratched his head and blushed, "How do I wake up, exactly?"

"Oh, for the love of... I thought you Palmans woke up all the time! Here, let me help you..."


	16. Homecoming

Ayn emerged from the chamber of solitude to be immediately ambushed by an enthusiastic tackle-hug from his fiance. Her mechanical strength immediately flung him halfway across the chamber again, almost breaking several bones. That was roughly when he realised he had completely forgotten how moving his limbs like a normal human being worked.

"You were asleep for a lot longer than is healthy for an adolescent male human. I was very concerned," she informed him, fixing him one of her best accusing stares. What he was being accused of, he wasn't sure. Having the temerity to attempt to die when she personally preferred him alive, maybe?

"Yeah, so am I, now I realise it," he groaned. He had been forced to rest in bed for too long before. He had been dangerously wounded in a particularly fierce battle with a Kilmoos pack. He woke up in the hospital attached to the chapel, pumped up with every healing elixir and restorative technique that could possibly be stacked together, feeling like he wished that last Foi had killed him off. This felt worse. At least he had been in a comfortable bed then, not suddenly passed out while still sitting upright on a ship observatory floor. Waking up apparently still suspended in space hadn't done him any favours in his quest not to immediately lose his lunch either.

"You do not look well," she observed, immediately grabbing him, pouring a dimate down his throat and filling up the hand around his neck with an aura of healing technique energy. 

He coughed, spluttered, made a sound he hoped was vaguely grateful, then commented, "I imagine it's gonna feel worse than this when I wake up in a full borg body."

"So, you've decided to commit after all," asked Rulakir.

"Why? Who was saying I wouldn't?" Ayn returned Mieu's suspicious look. She ignored him and fed him another dimate. 

"I was not sure exactly how you would react to your ordeal at all. Some people tend to come back changed. Although, close as you are to Algol, I was banking on you becoming more determined to be alive to see your homecoming."

"Yes, there is that," he smiled and looked Mieu in her eyes the colour of a Palman sky, "Having someone by my side to watch the ship approach Algol... someone I care about as much as the solar system itself... that just makes everything so much better there aren't words for it, never mind numbers."

"I am glad that I will be able to oversee one more act in this facility that was undertaken in the name of love, before I have to prepare for a battle that will shake the skies again," he sighed, "You should prepare for battle, too. I wish there was a way to create a safe environment for you to practice casting Megido, but it's Megido, so there isn't."

"Yeah, about that," Ayn scratched the back of his head, "There's things we're gonna have to discuss."

"What have you done this time, Ayn?" Mieu warned him.

"Um... where's Wren?" he asked, earning a glower from his fiance.

"He's busy," said Rulakir, "On the bridge itself. Plotting a course for the neutron star."

"He did, huh? Without conferring with anyone else?"

"He does technically outrank us when it comes to matters of the ship as a whole," Mieu reminded him.

"I don't know exactly what you did out there, Ayn - I highly suspect it wasn't what I asked you to do - but it's had an effect on Wren, on myself, on Dark Force, probably on the whole ship. Just for a few seconds, by your will alone, there was a... link. And it went to Wren as well. He was able to speak to other Wren models, the ones who maintain the central systems on Algol, not just the tiny detachment sent to oversee the ship. Shortly after telling me this, he went down into the room with the piloting controls. He managed to clear override my authority, even locked me out. I am not convinced ship's robot actually outranks Captain but there's little I can do now. Dark Force has apparently accepted the decision. The die is cast. Now all we can do is prepare to face our fate head on."

* * *

A dragon soared on emerald wings back to the other side of the world.

King Rhys was overjoyed to learn from someone with first hand experience that his son was still alive. True, the story sounded utterly implausible and there were holes in it where Thea didn't seem able to describe what happened even though she was there. However, Rhys hadn't really been expecting his son to be up to anything sane out there. Assuming he really was alive, he was in Terminus, and there wasn't anything sane to do in Terminus. Besides, he was the son of the hero who had literally moved the moons around. That, and united two warring nations. He should be proud that his father was not only following in his footsteps but apparently trying to one-up him with all of this traipsing around in forbidden areas and consulting with dark powers for the greater good of both the ship and its destination. 

"I do hope he knows which ones to trust and which ones not to, though," said Rhys, "It was easier in my day. If it was hostile, it tried to kill me. I think those days are over."

"Don't worry, I'll keep the idiot safe."

"That's nice of you. Don't get in Mieu's way, though. And don't neglect Lune," he told her, "Somewhere along the way, one of your generation needs an heir. We won't all live forever, no matter how much my son is trying. I don't think Sari is likely to get around to it either," he sighed, "Not that I can tell which generation is which any more, what with this new trend of legendary heroes of the Great War coming out of the cracks in the pavement every five seconds. I'm not even sure if it's technically decent to marry one of them, you know."

"Hey, he's strictly biologically not that old," protested Thea, "And we have the same hair colour. We're not going to end up with some unfortunate ugly hair colour. We've avoided it for so many generations and we won't give up the fight now."

"That's the spirit," said Rhys, "I'm probably lucky in a way, that my son is going to be doing things so different to normal. None of the matches had suitable hair colour."

"Hey, I was one of those matches!"

"And bright green does not go with light blue," insisted Rhys.

"I'm leaving," Thea sighed.

"Could you do me a favour and tell Lena her daughter is okay?" asked Rhys, "I loved Lena as well. If I had met her before Maia, things would have gone very different. Even though she has brown hair. Not that I ever regret meeting Maia. I just wonder what could have happened differently, you know?"

"Ultimately? With the weight of destiny we're carrying? Probably not that much, in the end," said Thea.

"Well, I'll be watching, even though these old bones can't really do much except keep this Kingdom from setting itself on fire. I'll be interested to see how my legacy is carried on. And remember, I want a third generation, okay?"

"Honestly," she sighed, "You're worse than my own mother at nagging me for grandkids that aren't even yours."

"Friends of family count as family," he said, "And we were close friends, your father and I, even when he did the most fiendish things possible to me. You keep your friends close to you as well, okay? Even Ayn, and I won't be at all surprised to find out that he's done something to you he's going to regret."

"You've no idea," she sighed.

Later, she set off to Satera to tell Lena all she knew.


	17. Into the Void

Since then, things started happening slightly slower, on a much larger, long term scale. The change of pace was difficult for Sari, who just wanted something to hunt, so she went off to train herself and consolidating the small cult that had developed around her, mostly centred around Neo Mota, which was now open to the rest of the world for the first time in thousands of years. After officially recognising her role as the next Alisia Landeel, the old sages of the sleeping settlement took her aside to actually bring her up to date on the history of the heroine she was supposed to represent. 

"So, she was frozen in a mechanical capsule, like Laya," said Sari, "So she'll probably be still alive somewhere, waiting to wake up, probably sort out business on her own end. So, how can I be the next incarnation of her?"

The sage smiled patiently. From what his intelligence sources told him about the Wild Princess of Satera, he had expected it to be like wringing blood out of a stone to educate her at all. However, when he met her in person, he was pleasantly surprised to learn that she had a surprisingly quick mind, especially when it came to her twin obsessions, monster anatomy and Orakian political history. Since she had apparently decided that, because she was the next Alis Landale and possibly also the next Orakio now she had his sword, the two family trees had intertwined at some point (something the Sages couldn't actually disprove), she had quickly absorbed the subject of ancient Algolian history into her set of obsessions. This meant she rapidly, constantly and utterly relentlessly asked the most awkward questions ever. It was as if her hunter's instincts were weeding out the information. Except badly, as she still seemed to miss the point half the time.

"You're not literally the incarnation of Alis, Sari. And you're probably not directly descended from her, although Alis did have children before she was frozen and there is a high chance some of them ended up on the ship, either by design or by complete accident of population statistics," he explained, "No, the line of Alis does not actually go through her genetics, but is information psychically passed on from soul to soul, like the form of the Lutz. And the thing is, that can only be done on Algol. What we are doing now is the emergency substitute set up for people outside Algol. It's why we have so many archives of individual roles in the cycle of Algol's history. We can't directly transfer, so we just have to tell."

"In other words, this isn't actually happening."

"There's very little difference between information about something and the thing itself, when it comes to techniques. The language activates the intended effect. With psychic impressions it's the same."

"History is written by the victors, huh?"

"That's the same principle, I suppose. Control the language and you control the thoughts of the populace. Although, we aren't exactly winning, out here," said the sage, "And I do fear for our future with the Alisia Queen acting like such a tyrant. It isn't actually interfering with the future of Algol, though, so there's nothing we can do either way."

"Don't worry, I intend to be a benevolent Galactic Empress," Sari folded her arms and leaned back on the pillar, "Look, there must be something you can tell me about the battle ahead. The enemy. What is a Great Light and how do you kill it?"

"I wish we knew," he sighed, "But the problem with fighting the Great Light is, the thing has been away from Algol even longer than we have, and has been corrupted a lot more than we have. They're so far away from the true cycle of fate that we have no idea what to predict, and we can't literally see the future anyway. Nobody can. We can only go by what destiny has prescribed for us, and people go against destiny all the time. You have to, when the enemy attacks and damages destiny itself, sends it out of control."

"Can their destiny be attacked back?"

"Not without becoming the same sort of monsters as them and losing ourselves in the process. All we can do is preserve and heal what they want to destroy. Don't worry, it annoys them so much it's almost worse, in their opinion," he smiled, "And there's nothing worse to them than remembering everything they want you to forget, valuing everything they want to deconstruct as worthless. And to use the language they want to change."

"Psychological and informational warfare. I like it," she grinned.

"So, you will agree to learn all of our secrets..."

* * *

Before Ayn began the process of full body cybernetic augmentation, he sat down with Mieu and a Guild catalog and planned out exactly what his new form would look like. A short discussion also confirmed that they were both fine with Wren having some say in this as he was the closest friend of both of them and Ayn had even been considering making him the best man, as he seemed like the most appropriate person to oversee this particular marriage. They were all steering towards the decision of a Siren model cyborg. After all, it was not only beautiful and deadly, it had a lush head of vibrant red hair, meaning that it fulfilled his father's criteria for any suitable bride - that the hair colour was compatible. He suspected that old King Rhys wouldn't be as interested ins this case, as there was no question of genetics, and if they did mutually construct a cyborg to pass their role on to, there was no protocol saying it had to resemble them whatsoever. As Mieu playfully pointed out, it could be an Agribot for all Central Command cared.

"I refuse to have an Agribot as a child," said Ayn.

"It was a joke, Ayn. You're going to have to learn to understand cyborg humour, you know."

"Mieu... I've been wondering... what or who exactly is 'Central Command'? I've heard a lot about what we are and aren't allowed to do but never had even one sign that this authority actually exists."

"It isn't literally an existing object. It's more of a distributed AI, a set of protocols inside of us that constantly talk to each other."

"Then it's not central, is it?"

"It's central to each one of us," said Mieu.

"Is this more cyborg humour," asked Ayn, "Or is 'Central Command' some kind of code for 'do as I say because I'm your wife and you're just a fleshy brief mortal'?"

"Well, I won't be able to use that particular card in our discussions for much longer, will I?"

"Arguments where you inevitably win are called discussions now, hm? Well, at least I can see you're learning about human culture as well."

"If we do go for a Siren model, I wonder what the Guildmaster will think of the choice," mused Wren, still flicking through the catalog, mentally calculating what would be the precise best combination of component parts to make a fast, strong, energy efficient and combat ready cyborg. 

Ayn had specified he didn't want a model that only did combat. He intended to live through the battle and a have a peaceful, quiet, relatively normal life with his wife, maintaining the ship while it returned to Algol, hopefully not putting down too many attempts to mutineer and redirect their course. One of the reasons for the choice of a Siren model was that it was recognised as both a control and a combat cyborg. Wren actually wanted something a lot heavier, stating that they were likely to end up in a fight with Earth's forces straight after being attacked by the Great Light. It was Rulakir himself who pointed out that the battle with Earth was likely be on a much larger scale, probably ship-to-ship battles, and that, while they were ultimately going to have to evade the fleet that would inevitably outnumber them by a huge margin, possibly do something clever and nasty to their flagship or home planet or both, a few single combat modules needed to be replaced by strategic and warfare command modules in any case. Ultimately, they all agreed, the standard Siren model would need to be heavily customised whatever they did, mostly because a default Siren was female and Ayn point blank refused to be a girl robot, even when Mieu interjected that it would look cute and it might help her get over the loss of Miun. 

"I don't care what the damn Guildmaster thinks about my private life," said Ayn bluntly, "He's poked his nose into this too much already, for his own personal gains and his cultish ambitions."

"You did kind of give him implied permission when you begged him for help with this," said Wren, "And he was married to a Siren himself. He's bound to have perfectly valid personal feelings about this. He's going to have to be stuck on the bridge with us all for quite a while."

"And who came up with this plan in the first place?"

"Ayn, you have a lot less say over this whole thing than you think you do," Wren sighed, "For instance, have you ever actually looked at the precise wording of the marriage chip's programming?"

"I don't read programming, Wren, and I thought we'd gone over it. Unless someone was telling me other than the truth," he answered, "It's a safeguard so Mieu can't murder me in my sleep and form her own immortal galactic empire, right?"

"I thought I explained to you that it was Sari who you needed to worry about that with," interjected Mieu.

"Sari's not immortal."

"Ayn, the chip doesn't even fit inside Mieu's core. It's a cybernetic chip designed not to be rejected by biological processes," Wren sighed, "To stop you from performing any action that might affect the running of the ship. In other words, to stop your personal feelings about one of our cyborgs from in any way affecting their duty, either by distracting them or causing you to remove them from a position where they can maintain the ship. It's a safeguard for you, Ayn, the human. The unpredictable, often violent human who doesn't quite have the capacity to see things in the long term."

"But..." Ayn opened and closed his mouth, suddenly lost for words, "But I'm not even going to be a human!"

"We're leaving the cerebrum intact to have a one hundred per cent chance to preserve your personality, remember? We don't have that," said Wren, "We're cyborgs in that we're machines with some lab-grown biological parts, not humans who became machines. You are still not going to be considered the same as us, Ayn. That will never happen."

"And you didn't think to TELL me?" he roared, instinctively reaching for a sword that wasn't there, because this was a meeting purely concerning love and future peace.

"When you predictably act exactly as we worried you would? No," Wren sighed, "Look, this does not in any way take your freedom from you. It is literally there to stop you taking away the freedom of Mieu to perform the duty she was created for. And Mieu consents, do you not?" The female cyborg nodded.

"But I don't get a say at all? You just don't trust me? As though I'm a, a child, or a madman? An animal, maybe?"

"You technically are an animal. But I should not talk, I am technically a weapon," said Wren, "I do not see why this is any different to what you assumed it was okay to do to Mieu. I hope you do not still consider us to be servants, Ayn, or you will not like the life you are stepping into."

"I asked Mieu! Several times!" he yelled, "And you never even indicated any of this to me!"

"But it's still okay, right?" Mieu looked at him with eyes wide and open as the sea they resembled, "You wouldn't throw away our chance at marriage just because of a protocol that honestly won't affect you?"

Ayn sighed, "For you. And I'll only trust you to insert it, understood? And if it affects my fight for our return to Algol in any way, trust me, I will find a way to break free from it."

"Rulakir has said the same thing. He has ways to assist you in disrupting it. And deactivating you, if it comes down to it."

"Wren... you honestly don't understand that nothing you say is ever reassuring, and most of it is quite the opposite, do you?"

"Delicate negotiations with humans does not fall within the sphere of my programming."

"Indeed. It shows," Ayn sighed, "But it's me, and I agree to everything, and in the end it's going to benefit Algol. I hope."

"I hope too!" said Mieu enthusiastically.

"It's all we can really do right now. It's a long way to Sol."

"Seriously, though, we need to at least warn Rulakir about the Siren thing."

"Do it, then. It won't change my mind. Nothing will, any more," said Ayn, "This ship's future... Algol's future... everything will be decided by this, and I can't afford to be weak, to fail to do my duty. That's why I chose to have a heart of titanium in the first place."

"Technically it isn't a heart."

"Go and tell Rulakir I've decided, that I want the chamber to be ready soon. That Thea is out there closing off all the loose ends and I trust her with them as my other closest friend. That soon she'll come back and we can finish this for good."

"You know, you still haven't properly explained what exactly you were doing with Thea..."

* * *


End file.
